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Volume 2 | Issue 5 // Free
Ed Ruscha
[Detail] La Brea, Sunset, Orange, De Longpre, 1999. Acrylic on canvas, 60 x 60 inches. ©Ed Ruscha.
Weinstein-SFAQ-Chance-Meeting-FINAL.pdf 1 4/15/2016 9:08:12 AM
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Ed Ruscha
In Conversation With
Andrew McClintock
I know you came out to California, specifically
Santa Cruz, from Oklahoma with your family a few
times beginning in 1949, but it seems that perhaps
when you drove out here in 1956 in your 1950 Ford
Club Coupe to go to art school is when California really bit you.
It was a four-door sedan and I came out here with my friend
Mason Williams who wanted to be an insurance actuary and
go to school out here, and I wanted to go to art school. So that’s
how it started. I wanted originally to go to Art Center School,
but their quota was filled so I had to go to this second choice,
Chouinard.
Which is now CalArts.
Yes, and Chouinard turns out to be the bohemian school. Art
Center School had a dress code. You couldn’t have any facial
hair, you couldn’t have especially long hair, you couldn’t wear
sandals or wear a beret, or you know, have any affectations
of a beatnik; I think they were trying to snip that in the bud. So
then I thought maybe my being forced into this other school is
going to do me some good. Art Center School had industrial
design and all of that appealed to me, but finally Chouinard
turned out to be better.
But didn’t Chouinard still have that kind of aspect of
being connected with Walt Disney? So your intention
was still perhaps to learn about more commercial
work in the beginning, but then perhaps the scene
kind of took over in your thinking?
Yes, I had this thought that I was going to be a sign painter or
something similar to that. Along the trail I took an advertising
design course, and I took editing design and fine arts courses,
painting, drawing, all that kind of stuff, and I eventually drifted
toward fine arts. I had some pretty good instructors there, but
I think I learned more from the people I went to school with.
There was a competitive spirit going on there; I picked up
on that and that seemed to really have an effect on me. So I
was lucky to go to school with a bunch of students who were
like-minded.
I’m going to pull a quote from your Smithsonian
interview with Paul Karlstrom: “I didn’t listen to
Elvis Presley anymore. I became a serious person. I
stopped going to church. The move to California was
the big change.”
Yes, I’d say that. There was a period of time when I was not
keeping tabs on geopolitical events of the day, so you might
say I dropped out. I missed a lot of pop culture. I liked Elvis, I just
didn’t listen to any music. And if I did it was mostly classical music. And I had no TV so I didn’t know what Gunsmoke was—all
these programs that were on the air, I never saw them. So I had
a period of time, like four years there, where I just was kind of
out of public culture.
So a very different cultural experience than your
contemporaries. So during this time too you started
to get turned on to Duchamp and Jasper Johns, like
Target With Four Faces (1958), and you said Rauschenberg, his “combines,” and de Kooning—were
these some of the artists in this kind of incubator period that really started to turn you on to some new
stuff?
Yes, and I saw a couple of exhibits of, like, Kurt Schwitters who
did little collages. I really liked his work, he was a Dadaist and
that was fascinating to me. As was Giorgio Morandi, the Italian painter. And Duchamp, he had a very mysterious, quizzical,
airy type of approach to making art, and a lot of my friends, we
all sort of admired Duchamp because he decided out loud to
quit painting and spend the rest of his life playing chess. We
thought: How great could that be? You can’t beat that. Because once you’re dedicated you’re supposed to stick with
it, and here was somebody who was not going to stick with it;
he finally ended up redeeming himself even though he didn’t
make much art the rest of his life, but turned out to be quite a
fascinating and educational person.
Definitely. It seems like you were looking at both abstract expressionist artists and also this new style
that was more impersonal and ambiguous, perhaps
more like works like Target With Four Faces by Jasper Johns. Was there an influential battle in your
mind, on your work, and then you ended up drifting—
Well, the prevailing attitude when I was in school was abstract
expressionism, and especially the New York School. It was hot
and new things were coming out from these people and we all
knew about Jackson Pollock, so it was kind of a new world. It
was popping through almost everywhere, this art activity from
New York City. We got in at school, and so abstract expressionism was the thing, and action painting, and facing a blind
canvas was the deal, and we all respected it and practiced it.
So you had these other artists like Jasper Johns, who came
through and started making things that were hard-edged and
symmetrical and with subject matter, so it was a totally different thing. I was greatly touched by those things. Rauschenberg and a lot of other artists began to emerge on this. So that’s
really where I got my feeling of it—so I came up with the idea
to approach painting as though it were something that needed to be thought out in advance. You conceived the imagery,
and then planned it out and executed it. So it was the opposite
of action painting, but there were still elements in it that were
similar.
After you graduated you took a trip to Europe for
about 10 months during which you spent a lot of time
in Paris, where you made your first paintings with
words . . . or did you start that in school as well?
Yes. I was doing that and I was traveling and I carried a little
painting kit with me where I would do these word paintings in
hotel rooms, and that kind of moved me, got me going—and
being in Europe, I didn’t see much beyond classical art and older art. I didn’t see too many contemporary things that turned
me on, but experiencing Europe was an eye-opener, and I felt
like I was really getting some work done at the same time. I
came back through New York and I went by Leo Castelli gallery and showed Leo my paintings. He was supportive and said
maybe we’ll do something together. So about 15 years later I
had a show with him. That kind of got me going, and when I got
back to L.A. I had to support myself so I worked at an advertising agency doing the layouts and I had to go through a sort of
fruitless period doing that so I could get back to painting signs.
I wanted to paint signs, not necessarily hamburger signs, not
necessarily watermelon signs, but ones that were on canvas,
like art signs. And all my friends that were painters, we all wanted to make something that would just blow your hair back, so
there was a kind of engine going on. You jump on there, you
make your art and that’s what it is. That’s how it pretty much
got going.
Page 4 [SFAQ V2 | Issue 5]
Ed Ruscha in front of Ferus Gallery, 1963. © Ed Ruscha.
It seems like you had this moment perhaps, when you
were in New York, thinking about staying out there,
and then you realized—again an interesting quote
that I found—that you “would have been chewed up
by the whole machine.” So did you consider staying
in New York at this point?
No, not really, but every artist really thinks about that at some
point and toys with it, and sometimes it becomes impossible,
like it was very expensive at that time to live in New York for
someone like myself, so I thought well it’s a little easier in California. You can move a two-by-four across town very easily,
and you can’t do that so much in New York.
Yes, I think that’s still very true. And also there’s—
well Castelli showed you a Lichtenstein painting of a
tennis shoe that had a very big impact on you. Is that
also because it was just a straight painting of a tennis
shoe? Would you relate that to wanting to just make
sign paintings in a sense?
No, not in that sense. There was something subversive looking
about this tennis shoe painting. It was done by Roy Lichtenstein who was basically an unknown artist then, but there was
something almost cartoony and disrespectful about it, and
something kind of nervy about it that I really liked. And then
finally the thing just became profound because it was like we
were laughing at ourselves. This guy and his art for the rest
of his life was showing us how to laugh at ourselves. He introduced an element to my way of thinking that was very inspirational.
Got it. So you’re back in LA, you’re hanging out at
Barney’s Beanery, you’re also hanging out at Ferus
Gallery at this time too? That’s kind of when it first
started—
Yeah, the Ferus Gallery—it was the foremost avant-garde art
gallery in the city. There were a couple, or three, other galleries,
but they didn’t have the magic that this gallery had. They had
artists that were very entertaining and constantly coming up
with new ideas—they all seemed to be part of a club almost,
yet they were all working in different disciplines. You had Ed
Kienholz, Billy Al Bengston, Ed Moses, Larry Bell, Robert Irwin, John Mason, and all these people were doing completely
different types of work, and it was inspiring and it was in this
flashy city of Hollywood with all its sparkle and swank. So at
that time back then—I almost felt like before I was living in
some kind of 1950s scratchy black and white movie. And then
enter this guy that I met named Walter Hopps who was almost
a legend when I met him. He was a curator, he was part of Ferus
Gallery, but he was very erudite and earthy at the same time,
and he affected all the artists. All the artists loved him. He gave
Duchamp his first one-man show at the Pasadena Art Museum so he was crucial to the kind of transition between the
artist and the public. He was able to talk to art collectors and
make sense out of things. He was connected and he was erudite, and he was a rascal at the same time. Never showing up
on time, being unreliable, but finally delivered what his mission
was, you know. So we loved him for that.
You did two shows when he was at Ferus, and then
the first show at the Pasadena Art Museum was the
pop show?
He did a show called the New Paintings of Common Objects,
which included myself and about seven or eight other artists.
Jim Dine, Joe Goode, Andy Warhol—I wonder why Rosenquist wasn’t in there, but he wasn’t. Anyway—you know, it was
titled that because the word “pop art” wasn’t even invented yet.
So that was his way of saying pop art: new paintings of common objects.
Let’s jump back to your two shows at Ferus. I believe at the first show you showed Box Smashed Flat
(1961) and Actual Size (1962)? And for the second
one you showed the Large Trademark with Eight
Spotlights (1962) and then Standard Station, Amarillo Texas (1963)?
Yes. Those paintings all related to one another and the word
paintings were there—those things were kind of based on little
noise words, words that related to noise and speed, and things
like that. Even the word “spam” sounds like a gun going off, and
I was kind of wrapped up in that spirit.
You mean of looking at words as sounds?
Yes. I sort of concentrated on monosyllabic words, utterings,
“pow”—things that come from comic books. All those kind of
words appeal to me, and other words too. I always like the word
“ace”, and that was always a humorous sort of thing connected
to comics somehow, and I just felt like that was the territory I
was working in.
You’ve mentioned you were looking at a lot of Dick
Tracy comics in high school and that your first experience with art was watching someone draw comic
book-related drawings. You have this quote about
watching the ink dry and how that had a big impact—
can you talk about those influences at all? Because
comics also show up later in your work, you actually
paint the comics as this almost surrealist element,
like cheap westerns in your painting.
A lot of those things were afterthoughts or like a coda in musical composition. The comic at the edge of a canvas, like it was
just thrown in as the very last thing, at the edge of a canvas,
ready to fall out, was my statement about that.
During this time your “lazy zoom” is starting to appear. This forced perspective, cutting the camera in
half—it’s related to film and CinemaScope, and also
related to you driving down the freeway and taking
photographs of these gas stations as things whiz by.
I’m interested in how you were thinking about “lazy
zoom” at this time.
I suppose that I wanted somehow—unconsciously—to combine the idea of speed and a gas station all in the same picture,
and those paintings would be lower right hand. The upper left
hand zoom factor came from movies where you would see a
train coming into the scene and it was always tiny in the distance and then in a matter of three seconds it would fill the
screen and roar by. I always liked that. That’s that sort of roar
that I wanted out of it. It had to have implied noise.
Actual Size, 1962. Oil on canvas, 71 3/4 x 67 inches. © Ed Ruscha.
That’s also related to the idea of these words having
built-in noise or vibrant energy as well.
Yeah, and then I was painting words for so long I wondered,
why am I doing this? I didn’t know why I was doing it—I had
done it for so long I forgot why I was doing it. And I liked that
too. But then I thought—am I painting pictures of words or am
I painting pictures with words? And the question is always out
there, and I’m glad I don’t understand it.
You’ve said that words have a temperature . . . I’ve
made these notations about things you’ve said about
words, and it’s definitely some interesting stuff.
There’s a quote from the late ’80s that reads, “Words
without thoughts never to heaven go,” which I find
really interesting.
That’s from Hamlet. I used that in a library commission I did for
a public library in Miami. I thought I could never improve on that
combination of words, especially for a library. At the same time,
absurdity and enigmas and paradox—all these sort of things
that suggest illogic—appeal to me. Somehow it comes out in
my work.
Yeah, definitely, like Jar of Olives Falling (1969), this
surrealist aspect comes and goes. For the pop art
show we were talking about, you dictated the show
poster over the phone to a commercial printer?
Our backs were at the wall and we had no time to make a poster and think about it so we were at the Pasadena Museum with
Walter and he said, “Why don’t we just call them in?” And so
that was it. I called up this placed called Majestic Poster Press
and they did circus posters, boxing posters, that sort of thing,
and we just gave them the copy and I told them to make it loud.
I liked the idea of remote control creation. You don’t often have
that opportunity to do that. Sometimes you’re given too much
time to think about something and you dwindle and dawdle
with it and never get anything really good, and so in this case
it was spontaneous, it was quick, and somebody else made it,
and it ended up being a beautiful poster.
So with this idea of being spontaneous and having to
put stuff out there very quickly . . . during this whole
time, even when you were in college and then in Europe, you were photographing a lot. Photography
has always been a big part of your career, but it first
shows up as studies and with your artist books, artist
publications, before you bring it into other contexts.
Obviously first was your 1963 book Twentysix Gasoline Stations. Was that a way for you to do something
on the fly without having to spend more time on it,
than an actual painting or drawing?
I knew at the time that it was kind of a sideways jump away
from painting and I felt like it was a risky thing for me to do and
call it my art, but I definitely felt like the book was a piece of art.
It was something new for me, but at the same time I had been
influenced by book design, and I loved the idea of a book being thought of as a work of art. You look throughout history and
it has been considered art, artists painted pages in books for
Dance?, 1973. Organic substances on raw canvas, 54 x 60 inches. © Ed Ruscha.
Standard Station - Amarillo, Texas, 1963. Oil on canvas, 64.5 x 121.75 inches. © Ed Ruscha.
centuries. I felt like, “This is dry, nobody is doing this, nobody is
making a book into a piece of art,” so that got me going and I
thought, “I need to make a book, but I don’t know what it’s going
to be about,” and I almost needed an excuse to make a book.
So the excuse is, possibly, these photographs I took of gas stations, and it just went from there.
Did you self-publish TWENTY SIX GASOLINE STATIONS? Were you doing all the typesetting too? Or
were you working with a printer?
I learned how to set type by hand, and I worked for a printer
here—a fine art book printer named Saul Marks—and I got an
appreciation for books. I thought, “Well, someday I’ll do my own
book, but I don’t know have an idea for one now.” Eventually,
doing the photographs and traveling, driving and all that, got
me into that groove and I just built on that. I felt like after I did
that one book, well, it’s not enough, I’ve got to do another one,
and then it just kept happening after that.
Definitely. And then your books THIRTYFOUR
PARKING LOTS IN LOS ANGELES (1967) and NINE
SWIMMING POOLS AND A BROKEN GLASS (1968),
both came from an hour-long helicopter ride, right?
In the Smithsonian interview I referenced earlier, you
mentioned going to Mexico City in high school and
it totally blowing your mind with its architecture. I’m
interested in the thought process of that and seeing
Los Angeles, which is this crazy grid, from up above
. . . seeing the city in this very different way. What
about architecture has an influence on you? It seems
to show up a lot, not only in your paintings, but in other books, like EVERY BUILDING ON THE SUNSET
STRIP (1966) as well.
So the books, the ones that are just architecture, it was the cultural aspect of it, just my take on what LA was like, and I liked
LA, I liked the nostalgia of LA. I think that we can kiss that goodbye now because it’s quickly changing. If you’ve never been
there you should see it before it gets swallowed up. It’s turning
into a turbocharged theme park. Back then I was concentrating on having an assignment, a self-assigned assignment, and
so doing those books were—I don’t know, it was just very fulfilling to do that.
And now those books have influenced zine making,
which is all of a sudden back in, and you know, it’s
just—it’s nice to see again. When I was at school at
the San Francisco Art Institute in the photo department, seeing those early books really turned me on
to thinking about photography in a more conceptual
way. These books have had a big influence on a lot of
people: at your show in New York, Ed Ruscha Books
& Co., it was fascinating to see how these books have
influenced other generations of artists.
TWENTY SIX GASOLINE STATIONS, 1962. © Ed Ruscha. Courtesy of the artist and Gagosian Gallery.
Maybe along the way there I sort of wound down making books, but I still keep that door open. I might have a few
thoughts on the refrigerator, and at some point I’ll jump back
on it and do something, but I had that run and it was a good run
while I was at it.
Let’s talk about your use of alternative materials that
show up in your paintings, and I believe sometimes
in your prints as well. Perhaps the first one you did
was the Stains portfolio, from 1969. What turned you
onto that?
I think I was becoming fatigued by the idea of putting a skin on
canvas with oil paint, and it seemed to me like maybe there are
some other things that I could use in place of the oil paint. So I
began to play around with these various materials. I could see
that they were staining the canvas, so it became a process of
staining rather than painting. It was a new frontier, as temporary as it was, and it only lasted a few years, but it was just sort
of a side exercise that I wanted to get into.
How does a work like Dance? from 1973 fit in—I
mean using cheddar cheese, ketchup and mustard,
that’s all pretty crazy.
I didn’t actually use cheddar cheese to make imagery with, but
I did images of cheddar cheese to illustrate cheddar cheese as
though they were objects in a picture.
In 1970 at the Venice Biennale you did the Chocolate
Room.
That was kind of a spin-off of things I was doing in London, and
I did a portfolio of silkscreen prints titled News, Mews, Pews,
Brews, Stews, Dues. They’re like six different ideas of what I
thought England was like. I used various materials, like chocolate and axle grease and caviar and grass clippings—things
like that—flowers, anything that would be able to put through
a silkscreen and would keep its image and wouldn’t bleed to
death or something. I was invited to go down there to the Biennale and so I packed up and took one of my ideas down there
and out of it came this chocolate room. The Biennale invitation
involved working with a printer who had a silkscreen setup so
I thought, this is the opportunity to do this, and that’s how it
came together.
So when one entered the room there was a very
heavy chocolate smell?
Oh yeah, you were just absorbed by the fragrance of chocolate, and it was very humid there anyway, so it was even twice
as fragrant as you might imagine.
Were people picking at it or trying to eat it or anything?
People would lick their fingers and draw on the shingle-size
pieces of paper. They would put peace signs and all number
of graffiti and things. I didn’t even care, I thought it was fine. It
was only going to be up there for a couple of months anyway.
For the Venice Biennale in 1976 you did Vanishing
Cream, where you were writing in Vaseline on a black
wall?
Yeah, that was done with Vaseline. I don’t even have a picture
of that thing, I can’t imagine. I mean, I’m fairly diligent about recording things just for my own observation and interest, and I
never got a picture of that, which I’m really sorry for. But it was
something that was put up and then when the show was finished it was just dismantled and thrown away.
Something I’ve got to jump back to about books and
photography—can you say a couple things about
EVERY BUILDING ON THE SUNSET STRIP? What
was your process with that?
I like the idea of recording, which I have for a long time, recording the elevation of a phenomenon: in this case it was a street
with stores and buildings. It happened to involve this mythical
place they call the Sunset Strip, so the whole thing amounts to
a string of buildings, and they began to appear to be as though
they were almost like a movie set, or it was all façade. I wanted
a sort of demographic approach to it, where there’s no agenda, and everything just fits together and you see every building
that’s on this stretch of land that runs two and a half miles, and
then I did the other side of the street, so that they face each
other. I began to look at it as though it was a straight facade of
all these buildings.
We should talk about the de Young show for a minute. This whole show is about the West. You’ve said:
“I love California style and that’s why I came here.”
I’m interested to hear your thoughts on what California style means to you now and what the West
means now, versus what it did back then. There was
something I read in the ’90s, or maybe it was the
early 2000s where you were talking about LA and
how much of a circus it’s become, and kind of moving away from what made the West so appealing and
beautiful to all the artists and freaks and everyone
that used to transcend out here. I know that’s a very
big question.
I’ve been all over the US and I have a particular soft spot and a
hopeful frontier idea that maybe the western side of the US has
offered more delectable subject matter. There is something
that appealed to me in traveling out here. It always involved
driving a car, so that’s where the gas stations came from, that’s
where sunsets came from, and it’s a combination of all kinds
of things crushed into something—it’s kind of, I don’t know,
crunching gravel, it just involves so many things. The western
side of the US has—there’s something—sunrise, sunset, hope
for the future, and you know, it’s not oily like the eastern side!
THIRTYFOUR PARKING LOTS, 1967. © Ed Ruscha. Courtesy of the artist and Gagosian Gallery.
In 2013 you joined the SFMOMA board. How did this
come about?
When they invited me to be on the board at SFMOMA I jumped
at it because I knew I could come and visit, and I’ve always
thought—and I’ve thought about this carefully—that San
Francisco is the most beautiful city in the world. And I can say
that because I think it’s got a mystery to it that hit me when I
was a kid and visited there. It still maintains that mystery. Any
time I get an opportunity to go to San Francisco I do. And
SFMOMA is opening up pretty soon and I think that’s going to
be an expansion of the cultural landscape up there. Even Gagosian is opening up across the street. It
seems there’s a lot of change happening, which I
hope sticks around.
Just in the last week and a half I curated this exhibit that’s going
to be on at Crown Point Press.
You’ve been doing your mountain series since 1998,
with both paintings and works on paper. It’s such
powerful imagery—
On these works, I imagine a curtain being opened and a mountain image occupies the space akin to a background. On stage
and certainly positioned are words or other objects. This
would be the show and tell of this kind of picture.
You’ve mentioned that you move around your work
stations in your studio to keep things fluid and have a
studio in LA as well as in the desert . . . Can you say a
few things about your work ritual?. I follow a predictable pattern of spastic, jerky motivations.
These are motivations that are puzzling to me to this day. I do
not follow astrology but my sign says that I do unimportant
things first. Page 8 [SFAQ V2 | Issue 5]
This is also an abstract question in a sense: I know
that Walter Hopps, even back in the ’60s, was this
kind of mythic curator already, and obviously now in
the history books he is this very mythic curator . . .
Do you think there can be another figure like Walter?
What do you think the West Coast needs?
It sure needs and could use another Walter Hopps, but I don’t
see one on the horizon. I mean there are a lot of very smart
people out there, but a lot of them are not interested in art. He
had this vast approach of understanding the hard side of life,
and that’s where he came from. I think it would be great if we
could, even if we invent somebody!
It seems to me that you are both a conceptual artist
and a pop artist—if there was one movement that you
would relate more to, what would that be? I know labels are strange things and I feel like you have rightfully entered into your own space . . . but just curious
about your thoughts on if there is a movement you
feel best fits your practice.
It’s amusing to see how so called “movements” evolve and
dissipate, and how certain artists eventually evade and fly off
from their positions in a given movement. Nothing seems absolute but all art seems to be made out of other art. I don’t know
where I belong and I’m content that way.
Large Trademark with Eight Spotlights, 1962. Oil on canvas, 66.75 x133 inches. © Ed Ruscha.
THIRTYFOUR PARKING LOTS, 1967. © Ed Ruscha. Courtesy of the artist and Gagosian Gallery.
[This Page] EVERY BUILDING ON THE SUNSET STRIP, 1966. © Ed Ruscha. Courtesy of the artist and Gagosian Gallery.
California Grape Skins, 2009. Acrylic on canvas, 38 x 64 inches. © Ed Ruscha.
Pay Nothing Until April, 2003. Acrylic on canvas, 60 x 60 inches. © Ed Ruscha.
Honey.… I Twisted Through More Damned Traffic To Get Here, 1984. Oil on canvas, 72 x 72 inches. Private collection. Courtesy of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.
Manaña, 2009. Acrylic on canvas, 38.75 x 72 inches. © Ed Ruscha.
A Particular Kind of Heaven, 1983. Oil on canvas, 90 x 136 1/2 inches. Courtesy of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.
Boss, 1961. Oil on canvas, 71 1/8 x 67 1/8 inches. © Ed Ruscha.
La Brea, Sunset, Orange, De Longpre, 1999. Acrylic on canvas, 60 x 60 inches. © Ed Ruscha.
Ace, 1962. Oil on canvas. 71 3/8 x 66 3/4 inches. © Ed Ruscha.
The Back of Hollywood, 1977. Oil on canvas, 22 x 80 inches. Collection Museum of Contemporary Art, Lyon. Courtesy of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco
The End, 1991. Color lithograph, image and sheet: 26 1/8 x 36 3/4 inches. Published by the artist. Courtesy of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.
SFAQ / May-June 2016
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Images Courtesy Of:
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Gagosian Gallery, and Ed Ruscha
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CONTENT:
Ed Ruscha
In Conversation With Andrew McClintock
Page 4-17
Cover Image:
Ed Ruscha,
La Brea, Sunset, Orange,
De Longpre, 1999.
Acrylic on canvas.
60 x 60 inches.
© Ed Ruscha.
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The Music from the Balconies, 1984. Oil on canvas, 99 x 81 inches. © Ed Ruscha.
April 20 - May 28, 2016
y r t e m m y S Symmetry
Paul Kos
Birds in Flight
Tom Marioni
June 1 - July 16, 2016
Constellated
Jean Conner
Lynn Hershman Leeson
Gay Outlaw
Anglim Gilbert Gallery at Minnesota Street Project
May 18 - July 2, 2016
Presence Known
Joan Brown
Gallery News:::
Frieze Art Fair, New York
May 5-8, 2016, Randall’s Island Park
Spotlight Booth D32: David Ireland
Civic Radar Book Launch
Lynn Herhman Leeson
Anglim Gilbert Gallery
14 Geary Street, San Francisco, CA 94108
Tel: 415.433.2710
Anglim Gilbert Gallery at Minnesota Street Project
www.anglimgilbertgallery.com
1275 Minnesota Street, San Francisco, CA 94107
Issue 4 // Free
Hans Haacke
Jacolby Satterwhite
Hans Haacke
In Conversation With Terri Cohn
Why did you come to New York? Where are you originally from?
I got a Fulbright scholarship to continue my postgraduate work
at Temple University’s Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia for the
1961/62 academic year. From there, I often took the bus to New
York, and, as I had done during a prior year in Paris, I went to
see exhibitions, made connections with other artists, and took
in the vibes. After that year in Philly, I moved to New York to do
more of the same, keeping myself afloat by teaching German.
Regarding the second part of your question: I was born in Cologne, Germany. When I was six years old, bombs fell in the
street where we lived. I remember walking by a still smoking
ruin on my way to school. We then moved to a small town south
of Cologne. And that’s where I grew up.
It sounds traumatic, experiencing that as a child. It
seems that the events of WWII may have influenced
your work in some ways, such as your 1967 show at
MIT, or the work Sanitation you created for the Whitney Biennial in 2000. Would you please talk about
this?
War is traumatic for everybody, no matter where.
I don’t think the MIT show made anybody—including myself—
think of traumatic experiences. In fact, it was a rather cheerful
show, as was its reconstruction at MIT’s List Visual Arts Center
in 2011. There are, however, a number of my works, which were
“inspired” by the ugly history of the country where I was born
and where I grew up.
A significant one is DER BEVÖLKERUNG (To the Population),
a permanent installation at the Berlin Reichstag (German Parliament building) that was inaugurated in 2000. It cannot be
understood without knowledge of the Nazis’ racist and deadly
interpretation of “das Volk” (the people).
You mentioned my Sanitation piece in the 2000 Whitney Biennial. You are right. Connoisseurs of typefaces could recognize
my hint to parallels between the Nazis’ expurgation of what
they called “degenerate art” and the “cleansing” of the National
Endowment for the Arts by Senator Jesse Helms’s “decency”
clause, and to Rudolph Giuliani, the mayor of New York, threatening the Brooklyn Museum over a painting in the Sensation
exhibition the mayor wanted to have censored.
Can you talk about your involvement in the ZERO
group? How did it shape your later work?
In the late 1950s—I was still an art student in Kassel—I saw a
group show of ZERO artists in Bonn. It was my first encounter
with ideas and practices that differed fundamentally from the
Tachism and art informel I had become familiar with during my
hitchhiking visits to Paris, which, at the time, was considered
to be the art capital of Europe. I then met Otto Piene in Düsseldorf. I was very taken by what I saw in his studio—and we
got along very well. Soon after, l also met his ZERO buddies in
Düsseldorf. By the time I graduated in 1960, these encounters
had left a trace in my paintings and constructions, to the extent that I was invited to participate in a number of exhibitions
by the international ZERO/Nul/Gutai et al. artists network.
Two of these exhibitions were held at the Stedelijk Museum
in Amsterdam. I also connected with artists of the Groupe de
Recherche d’Art Visuel, as well as with Soto and Takis in Paris. At the 1965 ZERO exhibition in Amsterdam, I met George
Rickey who—like Otto Piene—helped me to get my feet on
the ground in New York.
What trace did the encounters with Otto Piene and
his ZERO buddies in Dusseldorf leave in your paintings and constructions?
Piene was born in 1928. As a teenager he was drafted and assigned to an anti-aircraft battery. Günther Uecker and Heinz
Mack were only a few years younger. They all felt an urge to
disassociate themselves from the art and the attitudes of the
post-war generation that preceded them. They spoke of a new
beginning, and they shared a surprising degree of optimism for
the future.
Light, and how it throws shadows and causes reflections,
played a major role in their works. These were physical phenomena that I then also began to play with. In 1962, water, with
its particular physical behavior and properties, was added to
my repertoire.
This brings to mind your Rhinewater Purification
Plant from 1972 that was installed at the Museum
Haus Lange in Krefeld, Germany. I appreciate the way
in which you created a greywater reclamation project
in a museum setting. It seems it was well ahead of
its time.
Water, of course, is not always shiny. It is affected by its physical environment, which, in turn, is often shaped by its social
environment. The interaction of both was an essential aspect
of Rhinewater Purification Plant.
George Rickey came to my New York exhibition. He wrote recommendations that helped me a lot, and we exchanged works.
For a while, my Large Wave (1965) was hanging on his porch in
upstate New York, where he had his studio and lived. He later
donated it to the Neuberger Museum in Purchase, New York. I
still have his piece at home.
What prompted your transition from working with
“real time” systems and processes—works like Condensation Cube (1963-65) and Condensation Wall
(1963-66)—to focusing on institutional critique, art
and politics, and demystifying relations between art
and the outside world?
Water, enclosed in geometric containers of clear acrylic
plastic, evaporates and condenses on their inside walls. It
responds to changes in temperature, caused by air drafts,
lighting and other external factors. This process occurs even
when there is no viewer to provide an interpretation and give
it a “meaning.” Whether one looks at the Condensation Cube
as an artwork—there is no definition for art other than one
based on a social agreement—or one doesn’t, in either case,
the object’s physical interaction with its environment is an integral part of it. In other words: it is not an autonomous object.
Its surroundings belong to this “system” of interdependent relations. Very differently, when paintings and sculptures react to
their environment it is usually a cause for panic. A conservator
is called to repair the damage, and provisions for the control
of temperature, humidity, lighting, and pressure have to be installed or beefed up.
It was Jack Burnham who introduced me to systems theory
sometime in the second half of the 1960s. I thought its terminology and concepts were applicable to what I was tinkering
with. Reading Ludwig von Bertalanffy’s General System Theory gave me a deeper understanding and inspired me to continue with my kinetic, process-oriented works, and also to expand into biological and—toward the late 1960s—to deal with
social “systems.”
It was the time of the cultural revolution that shook Paris and
other European cities. In the US, the assassination of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. prompted me to write a preface to a lecture that I was scheduled to give. The Vietnam War
affected a great number of American families directly. It fired
demonstrations on campuses and in the streets of major cities.
There were the My Lai and the Kent State massacres. Racial
discrimination triggered large public protests. In New York,
artists got together and formed what they called the Art Workers’ Coalition to challenge the boards of trustees of museums
whom they saw as representative of the forces they viewed as
allied with the powers they despised. Nobody had the time to
worry about the fortunes of the art market.
That’s an interesting statement. It seems with all
that’s going on in the world right now, that it’s similar
to the late 1960s. How do you think this time has enabled people to worry about the fortunes of the art
market?
It was a very different world. Young artists were not faced with
huge debt. They could live in downtown Manhattan. When I arrived in New York, I paid $60 for my one-room apartment on
East 6th Street at 2nd Avenue. I used a drill press in a machine
shop in Soho to drill holes in acrylic plastic sheets for my rain
boxes. Soho wasn’t boutiqueville. It was a neighborhood of
blue-collar workers and artists, and it had some grungy bars. In
the ’60s and ’70s most of the collectors of works by artist activists were not driven to make a fortune, nor were they motivated
to surround themselves with bestsellers for social prestige.
Investors who buy and flip artworks were yet unknown. And
there were no art fairs. All that changed in the 1980s, during the
Reagan years, with a little respite when the Wall Street crash of
1987 hit the art market in the early 1990s.
But, in spite of the art market’s introduction of money as a powerful guiding principle, today there are also artists and activist
artist collectives in the US and other parts of the world who
respond critically to their social and political environment,
and also challenge art institutions. Some do so even in commercial galleries and, occasionally, in major museums. While
self-censorship by institutions—and artists—is a common
phenomenon, it is not universal. Although critical works rarely
make it into art fairs, they are often represented in biennials. In
that context, such works usually address issues in the country
where the artists are coming from, rather than troubles they
see in the host county. The embrace of an international biennial can serve as a protective shield in the artist’s home country.
Is that embrace you describe due to the fact that
the positive attention the artist and his/her work receives can make it difficult for an artist’s home country to censor them or their work?
Having been embraced by a prestigious, international venue
yields cultural capital to an artist. Her/his work can no longer
be dismissed as nothing but political propaganda that crosses
the line of what’s acceptable. It is now surrounded by the halo
of art. Censoring it risks it to be noted around the world.
Would you talk about your MoMA Poll (1970)? It
seems that museums today are invested in a model
for systems art that recalls this 1970 work.
I’m not sure about that. Few institutions readily present a work
that makes critical references to donors or members of their
boards.
Hans Haacke. © Hans Haacke/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
Photo by Hans Haacke. Courtesy of the artist and Paula Cooper Gallery, New York.
I agree that many or most institutions are reticent to
present work that critiques its donors or board members. But some artists—Martha Rosler, Andrea Fraser, and Fred Wilson, among others—have created
works that are related forms of institutional critique.
It seems that your work provided a foundation for
these artists and others.
At the time of the 1970 Information show at the Museum of
Modern Art, Nelson Rockefeller, the incumbent Governor of
New York State, was on the board of MoMA. His brother David
was the chairman (also chairman of Chase Manhattan Bank),
and their sister-in-law, Mrs. John D. Rockefeller III, was also a
board member. I expected the museum would not particularly
care for the question of my MoMA Poll, therefore I didn’t reveal
its wording in advance. I brought the panel with the question
to the museum only the night before the opening. And, sure
enough, the next morning, an emissary of David Rockefeller
appeared and told John Hightower, the museum director, to
take it down. Hightower, to his credit, didn’t comply. Decades
later, I found David Rockefeller quoting the question of my
MOMA Poll in his autobiography and saying that to keep it in
the show was one of several things that prompted him to sack
Hightower soon thereafter.
Gift Horse, 2014-15. Bronce skeleton with LED display of London Stock Exchange ticker on bow. 15 ft 3 in. x 14 ft 1 in. x 5 ft 5 in. Commissioned by the Mayor of London’s Forth Plinth Programme, Trafalgar Square, London.
© Hans Haacke/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo by Hans Haacke. Courtesy of the artist and Paula Cooper Gallery, New York.
This seems an example of hindsight being 20-20!
Since donors to MoMA and comparable institutions get a tax
deduction for their contributions, in effect, taxpayers substantially support these private institutions. I am not a constitutional
expert and cannot say whether this obliges the recipients of
such unacknowledged public funding to strictly observe the
constitutionally guaranteed freedom of speech (art). The ruling by a federal judge against Rudolph Giuliani over his attempt
to have a painting by Chris Ofili removed from an exhibition
at the Brooklyn Museum, which I mentioned earlier, seems
to indicate as much. The judge explicitly referred to the First
Amendment.
You phrased your question in terms of “systems art” and related it to my MoMA Poll. Whether we are looking at so-called
systems or a painting does not matter when we are discussing
the acceptance, rejection, or outright censorship of artworks.
To prohibit asking the visitors of an exhibition called Information a topical question gives that title a peculiar twist.
Last year, in Okwui Enwezor’s central pavilion of the Venice Biennale, I conducted, via iPads, a poll with 20 multiple-choice
questions. 21,000 visitors participated. To the question “Do
you live in a country in which authorities censor the works of
artists?” 41 percent of visitors who came from “North America” (US and Canada) clicked “Occasional censorship” as their
answer.
I’m sorry I missed last year’s Venice Biennale; I would
have really liked to experience that work. As for the
US and Canadian visitors who responded to your
poll, it seems that some must be aware of the highly
publicized censorship of artists who received NEA
grants during the 1980s, which directly led to the
1989 amendment to the law that created the National
Endowment for the Arts, enabled forms of censorship, and eliminated significant government funding
from the NEA’s budget.
Let me explain: Museum Haus Lange, like its parent, the Kaiser Wilhelm Museum in Krefeld, is a municipal institution. The
director of both is a civil servant, appointed by the City. His
budget is essentially the local taxpayers’ money; its size is determined by the elected members of the City Council.
In 1972, the City of Krefeld poured about 11 billion gallons of untreated wastewater into the Rhine. As part of a large triptych
in my installation, I listed all contributors to this mess, including the number of gallons of their respective contribution. The
largest polluter was a factory situated right on the Rhine that
was part of the giant Bayer group of corporations.
Paul Wember, the director of the two museums of Krefeld, was
well known, both nationally and internationally as a supporter
of “avant-garde” art (that was the word then used for so-called
“cutting edge”). Not once did he hint that what I was planning
might not meet his criteria for what’s fit to exhibit in his museum. In fact, his office connected me with experts in city agencies from whom I got technical help and statistical information
on the city’s wastewater disposal. In passing, it might be interesting to know that Museum Haus Lange used to be a villa built
by Mies van der Rohe for a local industrialist.
I’m also interested to hear more about how George
Rickey—and Otto Piene—helped you get going in
New York.
Thanks to Otto Piene, I was invited to participate in ZERO-related group shows in Germany and abroad. He introduced
me to two established galleries, the Alfred Schmela Gallery
in Düsseldorf and New York’s Howard Wise Gallery where, respectively, I had my gallery debut in Germany and an exhibition
in the US a year later, in 1966.
Page 4 [NYAQ Issue 4]
World Poll, 2015. Venice Biennale, Central Pavilion, 2015. Visitors responding to 20 demographic and opinion questions on iPads. Tabulation of answers
to question no. 8 at the end of the Biennale’s opening week. © Hans Haacke/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photograph by Hans Haacke.
Courtesy the artist and Paula Cooper Gallery, New York.
World Poll, 2015. Venice Biennale, Central Pavilion, 2015. Visitors responding to 20 demographic and opinion questions on iPads. © Hans Haacke/
Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo by Hans Haacke. Courtesy of the artist and Paula Cooper Gallery, New York.
Krefeld Sewage Triptich, 1972-2013. 3 Archival inkjet prints, each 12 x 13 5/8 inches. Solo exhibition Museum Haus Lange, Krefeld, 1972. © Hans Haacke/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
Photograph by Hans Haacke. Courtesy of the artist and Paula Cooper Gallery, New York
Sanitation, 2000 (detail). © Hans Haacke / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy of the artist and
Paula Cooper Gallery, New York. Collection Gilbert and Lila Silverman.
Sanitation, 2000 (detail). © Hans Haacke / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy of the artist and
Paula Cooper Gallery, New York. Collection Gilbert and Lila Silverman.
Rhine Water Purification Plant, 1972-2013. Archival inkjet print, 20 x 30 inches. Solo exhibition Museum Haus Lange, Krefeld, 1972. © Hans Haacke/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo by Hans Haacke.
Courtesy of the artist and Paula Cooper Gallery, New York..
But this shift seems particularly remarkable with
your installation Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, a Real-Time Social System, as of May
1, 1971. Although censored by the Guggenheim Museum in 1971, that work was also prescient relative to
gentrification today. Did you feel vindicated after the
work was jointly acquired by the Whitney Museum of
American Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art,
Barcelona?
In 1971, gentrification was not an issue. New York was a rundown city. The properties of Harry Shapolsky and his family
and associates were mostly located in Harlem and on the Lower East Side, making them the largest slumlords of Manhattan.
Poor tenants were subjected to the group’s notorious rent
gouging, and their buildings were known for many violations
of the building code. The properties were frequently sold and
mortgages were exchanged within the group for the purpose
of getting tax advantages and disguising who owned them.
It took 15 years until New Yorkers could finally see Shapolsky
et al., and get a sense of what the fuss at the Guggenheim was
all about. It was part of my 1986 exhibition at the New Museum. Already in the early 1970s and 1980s it had been widely
exhibited in Europe. The joint acquisition you are referring to
occurred in 2007. For many, the inclusion of the work in the
opening show of the new Whitney Museum last year was their
first opportunity to catch up with what had become a legend.
I heard this from people who had lived in some of these buildings. Also the gentrification of these neighborhoods became a
topic of discussion.
Your fourth plinth project, Gift Horse (2015), seems
to have had remarkably positive responses from
most people. I wonder if most understand the intentions of the work, which are revealed by its title, but
not by its form. Can you talk about this?
It does seem to be quite popular. Most if not all people who
see this skeletal occupant of the fourth plinth on Trafalgar
Square do not interpret it as a celebration of the London Stock
Exchange and its effect on the global economy, particularly
when seen in comparison to the imposing equestrian statue of
George IV on the opposite side of the Square. The doctrine that
an unfettered pursuit of economic self-interest, guided by the
“invisible hand of the market,” will ultimately promote the public
good, is followed only by the Koch brothers and their like. The
faithful do not normally congregate in Trafalgar Square.
Do you know how most people do interpret the skeletal horse?
The ticker of the London Stock exchange, of course, makes
them think of what it represents. Some relate it to paintings by
George Stubbs. Judging by what I read and what people say
when they speak with me about the Gift Horse, they take it as a
sarcastic comment on the capitalist gospel.
I was tickled to see, the other day, that a photo of the Gift Horse
was chosen by the editors of the Süddeutsche Zeitung (a national German newpaper) to accompany an article about the
planned merger of the London Stock Exchange and the Deutsche Börse in Frankfurt.
Since you taught in an art school for a long time, what
do you think is the most important piece of advice
you’d give an emerging artist?
Making money should not drive what kind of art you produce.
You must find a way to be independent of the fortunes of the
market and the predilections of collectors. I know that’s not
easy.
With more platforms for selling art today (the Internet in particular) new markets seem to be emerging
for younger artists, which is not necessarily helpful
for their independence in this way.
Your 1965 manifesto, which calls for the artist to
“make something which the ‘spectator’ handles, with
which he plays and thus animates…” seems to have a
relationship to your current work. Although the form
of your work has changed, has the concept remained
relatively consistent?
I believe the viewer and the works—not only mine—interact
in an untraceable way. Artworks affect people’s attitudes
and thereby a society’s consensus—with social and political
consequences. That’s what animates the censors. Years ago,
I spoke of “Museums, Managers of Consciousness.”1
Your vision as an artist over time has encompassed a
breadth of critical issues that concern the future of
the world. As an artist, what do you feel is the most
important issue to be addressed in this contentious
period of history?
That’s a big question. Let me answer by quoting the battle cry of
the French Revolution: “Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité.” Freedom,
Equality, Brotherhood— or the non-gendered: Solidarity.
1) Haacke, H. (1983/2006). Art in America (New York) 72, no. 2
(February 1984): 9-17.
On Social Grease, 1975 (detail). 1 of 6 plaques. © Hans Haacke / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photograph by Walter Russell. Courtesy of the artist and Paula Cooper Gallery, New York Collection Gilbert and Lila Silverman.
Installation view, NUL, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, 1965.
© Hans Haacke / Artists Rights Society (ARS), NewYork. Courtesy of the artist and Paula Cooper Gallery, New York.
Sky Line, 1967. Solo exhibition, MIT, 1967. © Hans Haacke/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
Photograph by Hans Haacke. Courtesy of the artist and Paula Cooper Gallery, New York.
Blue Sail, 1964-65. Chiffon, oscillating fan, fishing weights and thread, dimensions variable. © Hans Haacke/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo by Hans Haacke. Courtesy the artist and Paula Cooper Gallery, New York.
Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, a Real-Time Social System, as of May 1, 1971,
1971. Two maps (photo enlagements), each 24 x 20 inches; 142 photos and 142 typewritten
sheets, each 10 x 8 inches; 6 charts, each 24 x 20 inches; one explanatory panel, 24 x 20 iinches.
© Hans Haacke/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy of the artist and Paula Cooper Gallery, New York. Edition 1 of 2: Collection of Centre Pompidou, Paris. Edition 2 of 2: Jointly
owned by MACBA, Barcelona and Whitney Museum of American Art, New Yor.
Condensation Wall, 1963-66. Acrylic plastic, destilled water, 70 x 70 x 16 inches. Edition 1 of 3: Collection Jill and Peter Kraus; Edition 2 of 3: Collection National Gallery, Washinton, D.C.; Edition 3 of 3: Collection Museum Ludwig,
Cologne, Germany. © Hans Haacke/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo Lee Ewing. Courtesy of the artist and Paula Cooper Gallery, New York.
Jacolby
Satterwhite
THIEF OF HEARTS
Jarrett Earnest
“She’s a thief of hearts, someone please arrest her!”
One sweaty summer I saw on Instagram that Jacolby Satterwhite and I were both in Miami, so I sent him a note. A few nights
later I picked him up outside a party. As he hopped in the car
I suggested we go to a trashy bathhouse in southwest Miami
called Club Aqua. He laughed, “Put on Madonna—Thief of
Hearts!” Just like that, I adored Jacolby Satterwhite, in the same way I
immediately loved his art. Satterwhite is known for phantasmagoric animated videos in which he uses his own body to
create gyrating architectures and mythological narratives—a
3D Hieronymus Bosch. We met back up in New York to discuss
his background in figurative painting, his thoughts on digital abstraction, and the difficulties of using bodies as signs. You came out of painting and drawing: What was
your painting like, and what interested you in it?
When I was at the height of my painting investigations I was
mostly influenced by New Leipzig school painters like Neo
Rauch. And I liked South African painters like Marlene Dumas.
I was really into figuration. I was also into classical painting, as
well as Phillip Guston. Peter Doig is still one of my favorites. I
have an eclectic range of interests. I am a formalist and I was
interested in the medium, the viscosity of it—I was romantically involved with the tactility. I had a very romantic approach, but
it was too romantic.
I approach my current practice with the mindset of a painter. I
still mix a palette, but I no longer grab my palette and my palette
knife and get my reds and oranges and just go ham—I don’t
spend three hours on that anymore. Instead, I spend three
hours building a digital palette, literally. Maybe that means
changing the color of two thousand figures and sorting them.
I build compositions first and write essays and then outsource
other bodies, then I Google various random found-footage imagery, and then I work in Maya, a 3D animation program. I use
all these variable and methods to generate storylines, to generate composition.
To go back for a second to your pre-digital moment:
Were you interested in abstraction in painting?
I’ve always been interested in abstraction. When I was a teenager, I was deeply into the Bauhaus, and I read about all the
corny stuff like Kandinsky. Then I got into Josef Albers and abstract sculpture like Lee Bontecou and Eva Hesse. I was interested in mid-century abstraction and formalism, then somehow segued into still-life paintings and got into Morandi. Then
in my early twenties, I wanted to get away from rules and stuff,
so I lost interest in the theory behind painting and the politics
behind abstraction. I was trying to figure out an autonomous,
apolitical voice as a painter so that I would have the freedom to
live in my own meta-narrative. Now I don’t have to think about
anything but my personal mythology; I build up my own lexicon
and that is what makes me happy.
How do abstraction and figuration work differently
in painting than in the digital work you are making
now?
They are physical in different ways—the tactility is different.
They are both sexual. Actually, the only difference is that they
are different. They are so similar—I don’t feel like I’m doing anything different. I’m trying to make the same image I was trying
to make as a painter; it just happens to move. My body is involved. Touch is way more involved.
Could you explain how touch works digitally?
When I was painting, I had 600 brushes, so there was a certain kind of physical labor that was immediate. When I make
my videos I use a Wacom pad and trace my mother Patricia
Satterwhite’s drawings in the 3D program. I spend a month
building and sculpting her drawings and tracing the lines and
zooming in on her graphite, really figuring out how to manifest
her vision—it winds up being so analog. It’s not like I just insert
something into a program and whoop it’s 3D. It’s not a magic
trick; it’s very much about drawing, it’s very much about making
a preliminary sketch. Then, after I’ve sculpted these drawings, I
have to color them and do gradations and figure out what palette I’ll use. I might decide, “I don’t want tertiaries, I want neutrals,” or, “I want to deal with more muddy palettes.” So I color
every single one of her lines while streaming Scandal or Entourage on HBO GO because the process is repetitive. Then
I’ll ride my bike up north to the studio and spend a week with a
bad back wearing twenty different leotards in front of my green
screen. I have a purple leotard, an ochre one, a cheetah-print
one: those are different characters, different colors, different
bodies. I think of the leotards as a way to define my palette because of the specific ways color signifies when you see it in a
video. Then I go back in Adobe After Effects and abstract the
leotards: changing the ochre into a pink, changing the purple
into a teal, building two thousand different characters who
have different William Forsythe–style movements that emerge
in the composition. My movements are based on composition
because the way I build geometry is with squats and dips and
twirls. If you look at my new compositions, these Boschian,
Rubensian situations, they’re very painterly. They’re very much
about space and trying to figure out the compositional curiosities I had as a painter—I don’t see it any differently.
Your new C-prints are eight by eleven feet. When
you make an image at that scale, how does it relate
to the person looking at it? When most people think
of digital media they think of a computer screen, or
maybe an animated film. But this seems to relate to
a grander, almost billboard scale.
I’m exploiting Maya’s technology for getting crisp images at
large scales. Working with this amount of detail is deliberate
because it makes the image a time-based experience; there
is so much to absorb and take in. The scale being eight foot by
eleven feet, your eye has to travel in a certain way that requires
time. An Agnes Martin requires your time, but in a different way;
with this, you can’t consume everything without looking left,
right, up, down, and arching your back and zooming in—it’s
a very bodily experience. Because Maya can print things 84
by 60 inches at 400 dpi, I can really play with those potentialities of detail and space. I was trying to make paintings like
this a long time ago—they were simpler than 500 bodies but
they definitely had a certain kind of Polly Pocket, Final Fantasy
aesthetic.
Tropical Cream, 2015. Courtesy of the artist and Moran Bondaroff.
Factory Two, 2015. C-print, 45 × 80 inches. Edition of 2 + 1AP. Courtesy of the artist and Moran Bondaroff.
The Matriarch's Rhapsody (still), 2012. HD digital video with color 3D animation, 43 minutes 47 seconds. Courtesy of the artist and Moran Bondaroff.
Interstate 75, 2015. C-print, 78 × 60 inches. Edition of 2 + 1AP. Courtesy of the artist and Moran Bondaroff.
Leopard Interstate, 2015. C-print, 45 × 80 × 3 inches. Edition of 2 + 1AP. Courtesy of the artist and Moran Bondaroff.
I’m interested in your relationship to drawing and
what it means to re-draw all of your mother’s drawings. How do you learn from drawing as a process
or tool?
I’m a colorist. I lose myself in my mother’s line and I can use her
language as a vessel, as a backdoor strategy to indulge some
surrealist tendency. She gives me a means by which to focus
on color, texture, and space: I don’t like line necessarily, but
when dealing with its actual construction, I think formalism is
important.
What does formalism mean to you?
I think formalism is the foundation of art; for sculpture and
painting and drawing, formalism just means line, color, shape,
space, light—it’s like focusing on the objective component in
order to build more subjectively. I really make sure that I have
as many objective variables as possible before I start going
into the juicy stuff: the content, the politics, the porn stars,
and Trina. I want to build the most beautiful abstract, dense,
and explosive space possible before I start to give in to my
impulses toward perversion. I think that if you really dedicate
yourself to the craft of things, the poetry that lives beneath it
can come out, giving everything so much more agency and
strength, and it allows you to feel more confident when making
quick, honest gestures. I put so much labor in my work so that
I can be very honest when I get to the actual idea. You could
spend four months researching and researching and making
up a manifesto about a certain conceptual idea and it could
wind up being stuffy and suffocated and dead and dishonest.
It’s like when you’re a dancer and you improvise movement for
an hour, building up rhythms—it’s very direct and honest. I’m
pursuing many ways to be direct.
How does your idea of abstraction relate to being
direct?
That is the whole definition of abstract. In the 1950s, it was
a very bodily thing: de Kooning with a big brush that slams
against the surface and makes an “honest” mark—it’s visceral,
it’s performative. It is what it is: it isn’t an illusion. It’s flat. I think
the flatness in abstraction can yield truth.
Are you interested in truth?
I’m interested in my truth. I’m interested in my pleasure, and my
pleasure is my truth. So if I make something that gives me pleasure, it’s true because I feel fucking good, therefore if you look
at it you’re going to get some truth.
How do you think about the identity of “Jacolby Satterwhite” as a character in your work?
I’m a performance artist, so I’m naturally going to be a loaded
presence in my work because I’m physically in it. All the metonymy of “Jacolby Satterwhite” is in the work. I use my background as one of the building blocks for my narrative.
How did you start doing performances?
Really randomly, as an undergrad. I used to carry around my
mother’s drawings. One day an instructor asked us to bring in
something that we didn’t feel was art. I brought in this work I
had made recently: my family photographs next to my mother’s drawings. I was interested in the synthesis between her
drawings and what was actually happened in the past. She
was doing schematics of her memories through objects, like
the pocketbook that she hit her husband with in 1988; she
made a drawing of the pocketbook and the mason jars that
were next to it. So I thought to put family photographs next to
those drawings. I was interested in that binary.
Then when I started really looking at the drawings I thought,
“These are really interesting, I want to make these into a sculpture.” I made a costume based on one of her drawings—I
sewed some Leigh Bowery thing. Then I thought, “You know,
these drawings are kind of like performance scores from the
‘60s. They’re like Fluxus—they have words, the objects are
like memories, and the photographs are like performance
relics. Why not find a way to manifest these in the future as
performances?” I was trying to physically manifest different
aspects of the drawings: dancing in public in Central Park,
Times Square, Philadelphia. I started doing these movement
pieces and building installations that referenced the objects
in the drawings. There were objectives: I saw the drawings as
instructions for tasks. It was a failure but really provocative at
the same time—there was something happening by trying to
force these disparate ideas together, trying to pressure something that doesn’t belong to belong. I’m always trying to merge
a cluster of ideas that normally don’t belong.
Then I went to grad school and we had more conversations
about those videos and I liked the way the conversation was
going. I liked that they weren’t talking about “history” and “politics”; they were talking about me. I liked the immediacy of my
own body, which produced a discourse, so I decided to focus
on the performances. Then I decided I really missed painting,
so I taught myself animation. I bought After Effects with a tax
refund check and started playing with footage I had collected of myself performing in the woods. I wanted to draw on
top of the footage, basically to make it a digital painting. With
rotoscoping and tracing frame-by-frame, I made these performative, animated/live-action videos that I really enjoyed.
I love post-production. I love the magic and abstraction of
digital media. At some point, through a lot of trial and error in
the programs, I discovered I could trace Patricia Satterwhite’s
drawings into these pipe forms and planes and actually manifest them into a landscape, and within that landscape I could
put the figures. This was so important, because I could have
my cake and eat it too: I could be the painter I always wanted to
be, the performance artist I always wanted to be, and the music video person I always wanted to be—everything just came
together. Then I started really going ham on it and studied 3D
animation and the potentials of Maya—there are still so many
possibilities.
Basically, there is an arsenal of language that I’m trying to intersect with the body, the performance, the painting language,
the landscape language, and the idea of combining live-action
and mediating it with animation. There is just so much going on
and so many networks to negotiate. Putting it out to the public
was a way of extending the frame, putting the characters outside of the world that I built and having them manifest a visceral
form.
Did you study dance?
My brother was a dancer and I had a very dance-y family. I’ve
gotten much more sophisticated with my dance style. I didn’t
study it, but I went to a boarding school with a dance program,
so I’d go to recitals and look at people. I looked at a lot of dance
scores. I hung around with my voguing friends as a kid—they
went to balls and stuff. The influence is real, but I didn’t start to
hone in and become a better dancer, take care of my body, and
go to the gym until I started doing these green-screen performances. I’m much better now than I was even a year ago.
I’ve infinitely improved; I have restraint as a performer. When
I’m in a green-screen video, I have a specific agenda with my
movement; when you limit your movement with an objective,
you have to become creative with how you move that arm from
left to right. When you start to develop a range within limited
movement, you become a better dancer, and that is what’s
happening. I’m learning how to be a dancer through finding a
system for my own style of dancing—it’s not voguing, it’s not
modern—I’m building a style that fits the content of my work.
A lot of your work plays with the relationship between the physical body and the image of the
body—e.g. between the aesthetics of online porn
and that of actual sex. How do you see that dynamic
unfold?
What I like about the physical body is that—whether it’s Trina or
Antonio Biaggi or me or the random guy on the street—we all
represent something. Our bodies are like a font; everyone has
a specific representation of their identity and it’s very reductive: like “white male” or “camp diva wearing sequins and hair
weave.” I think every body is a loaded essay; if I cast someone
in my work, I give it some forethought. Using Antonio Biaggi for
me was a very deliberate, meta thing. I wanted someone who
is famous for breeding and bareback porn to go with the fact
Genesis Region Two, 2015. Wallpaper, dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist and Moran Bondaroff.
that I was breeding a new language in my work—the whole
thing was a world-building video. All these things kept birthing. Landscapes kept manifesting. I knew my work was about
to transition to a different place, so I wanted to make a piece
where this guy inseminates me with a new language. After he
comes in me, an egg comes out, and when it hatches, there
are thousands of people inside. The older work was just me
and my body in some obscure, eccentric space. But the more
I make pieces, the more specific they get; I wanted a bareback
porn star to birth that specificity. That is why I used him.
How do you think narrative operates in the films?
I concoct narrative in a surrealist way. An example of one process: I write a list of 30 items in my mother’s drawings. I’ll write:
shopping cart, shoe, roller coasters, teacup, butcher-knife,
tampons with robotic digital devices implanted in them—
then I put them into Microsoft Word and I try to fill them in and
make sentences out of that list, which makes absolutely no
sense. Then I try and clean them up and allow that to guide
the landscape I’m building in the animation. It’s my subconscious, honest space; what it yields, I don’t even really understand, but it definitely shows my tendencies, my repetitions.
Then I have to negotiate how to make that concrete, to reify it.
That is how I build narrative. I’ll observe a motif I’m interested
in and then think, “You know who would be the perfect person
for this particular idea, this particular thing that I’m repeating
in this stream-of-conscious essay? Trina.” Then I pursue her
and put her in the video. I take risks by trying to stay faithful to
nonsense. To make nonsense sensible—that is to put it within
a grid and try to sew it together—that process of making abstract video is similar to making an abstract painting: you make
a bunch of marks and try and make them have harmony. I feel
I’m trying to bring disparate languages together to build harmony in my videos.
The last thing I want to ask you about is sci-fi aesthetics or the conceptual apparatus of science fiction. What does it give you?
My work is futuristic, stylistically, and the medium lends itself
to that. I do love fantasy. I’ve beaten every video game, those
nerdy lock-yourself-away-for-300-hours kind of games. I
was deeply into those and they shaped my image preferences. Also, the impetus behind fantasy is that you can deal with
heavy politics if it’s masked in spectacle; everyone will just get
lost in the spectacle. It’s like a scapegoat for really advanced
ideas. Miyazaki’s Princess Mononoke was an AIDS movie but
everyone thought it was about a wolf running through a landscape biting people’s arm and giving them lesions. That is what
anime can do—talk about Hiroshima, bombs, and the bad
economy. Spirited Away was about child prostitution, which
you didn’t even realize because it was so magical; there were
so many dragons. I am talking about a schizophrenic woman
who has been homebound for 15 years, and I’m talking about
meth heads and bareback porn stars and raunchy ex-stripper
rappers, but putting them behind the lens of science fiction
aesthetics to allow them to dissolve into something beautiful.
I think that is what my science fiction does.
What do you think is being talked about in art right
now that makes sense, and what do you feel has
nothing to do with you?
I don’t think I have anything to do with being “post-Internet.” I
don’t even know what that means. “Post-black” doesn’t make
any sense either. Both post-Internet and post-black are basically saying: take politics and make something pretty with it—
use the aesthetics as a device. But really, put me in any category you want—I think that is what art is about: everybody can
be contextualized by each other. We are all living and breathing
at the same time in the same city, and we are all drinking the
same Kool-Aid whether we want to believe it or not. And when
the history books are written there will be a spiderweb between A, B, and C. You can look at all these people who didn’t
want to identify with each other, but at the end they were all
in the same conversation, they were all like: “fuck de Kooning
and Elaine—I’m me”; “fuck Warhol’s faggot ass—I’m me”; “fuck
Philip Guston’s traitor ass—I’m me.” In the end, they were all
drinking the Kool-Aid.
NYAQ 4 / May-July 2016
Andrew McClintock
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Images Courtesy Of:
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CONTENT:
Hans Haacke
In Conversation With Terri Cohn
Page 4-9
Jacolby Satterwhite
In Conversation With Jarrett Earnest
Cover Image:
HANS HAACKE
MOMA-Poll, 1970. 2 transparent ballot
boxes with automatic counters, color–
coded ballots, each 40 x 20 x 10 inches,
paper ballot: 3 x 2 1/2 inches. © Hans
Haacke / Artists Rights Society (ARS),
New York. Courtesy of the artist and
Paula Cooper Gallery, New York.
Issue 5 // Free
San Jose, Calif.: Angela Davis, militant on trial for alleged activities in connection with Marin County Court shootout, attends her first news conference since being released on bail, February 24th, 1972. © Bettmann/CORBIS.
Angela Davis The Meaning of Freedom • Jepchumba The Rise Of African Digital Art • Indira Allegra In
Conversation With Sarah Biscarra Dilley • Sampada Aranke Style Wars: Shades Of Cool • John Rapko
Up From Contemporaneity; Or, Why Do Curators Talk Like That? (Part 3) • New Contemporary Poetry •
Mark Van Proyen On Point 2.10: Remembering James Albertson • John Held, Jr. Move Your Archives
Millennial Collectors: Gary Yeh In Conversation With Anna Hygelund • Hera Büyüktaşçıyan Arie Amaya-Akkermans
Angela Davis
The Meaning of Freedom
Metropolitan State College, Denver
February 15, 2008
Since the theme of this conference acknowledges the two
hundreth anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade in 1808, I
decided to talk about the meaning of freedom. The conference
theme emphasizes two hundred years of freedom. What has
that freedom meant for people of African descent? What has
that freedom meant for the black world? And what has been
the relationship to communities that are differently racialized
but which, nonetheless, suffer under cycles of oppression?
I suppose that very few people think about the fact that the
institution of the prison has claimed a place at the very core of
black history, particularly since the abolition of slavery. It has
been a constant theme in the collective lives of black people in
this country. It has also been a constant theme in the collective
lives of Chicanos. And it is increasingly a major aspect of the
lives of people who are racially oppressed in Europe, as well as
in Latin America, and when one looks at the continent of Africa, one can readily see the extent to which the institution of the
prison is actually beginning to replace institutions like education and health care.
When Carter G. Woodson proposed in 1926 that the nation annually set aside one week for the celebration of Negro History
Week, he was confronting a dominant culture that almost totally marginalized black accomplishments, and it was important to
transmit the message that we were capable of vastly more than
white-supremacist society attributed to black communities.
Then, of course, a half-century later the celebration was extended to the entire month. The month of February offers us a
kind of microcosm of the history of the black world. February is
the month, as far as the United States of America is concerned,
when the Fifteenth Amendment authorized black male suffrage.
February is significant to black history of many other reasons
as well. The Freemen’s Aid Society was founded in February.
W. E. B. DuBois was born on February 23, 1868, and it was on
February 23, 1972, that I was released on bail. But it was also
during the month of February that W. E. B. DuBois convened
the first Pan-African Congress in 1919 to urge people of African descent throughout the world to unite in order to stand up
against European imperialism. February was also the month
when the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Martin
Luther King’s organization, was established, and when the students staged sit-ins at the lunch counters in Greensboro, North
Carolina. That was in February of 1960. We could actually continue to do a whole panorama of black history by looking at key
events that happened during the month of February.
What I’d like to say now is that Black History Month seems to
have become an occasion to generate profit. If you look at the
Walmart Web site, Walmart, which is the largest corporation
in the world, you will see how they urge you to celebrate black
history by buying their products. Wal-Mart, as the largest corporation in the world, demonstrates the impact that global capitalism has had on our lives and the conditions of neoliberalism
under which we live and think. Through Walmart’s action we
see how capitalism has insinuated itself into our desires, our
dreams, and our ways of thinking about ourselves. We commodify ourselves when we talk about how we’re going to market ourselves. So keep that in mind as we go back and look at
some aspects of black history.
We most frequently celebrate Black History Month by evoking
a collection of narratives about individual black people who
managed to overcome the barriers created by the racism of the
past, whereas we should have a broader conception of what
it means to celebrate the legacies of black history, and those
legacies should not be confined simply to people of African
descent. I’m thinking of someone like Yuri Kochiyama, who
is a Japanese American woman who has for the overwhelming majority of her life—and she’s about 82 years old now—
worked in the civil rights movement, worked to free political
prisoners. She was with Malcolm X when he was assassinated,
and there is a picture of her cradling Malcolm X’s head in her
hands as he lay dying. We don’t necessarily bring Yuri Kochiyama into our celebrations of Black History Month. Or Elizabeth
“Betita” Martínez, who was one of the most amazing activists in
the early civil rights movement.
We celebrate individuals, but we also evoke the legislative and
court victories that have helped to produce a black subject that
putatively enjoys equality before the law. Therefore, we rightly
celebrate the abolition of the slave trade in 1808, and we also
celebrate the Thirteenth Amendment that we think abolished
slavery, and we celebrate the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which
one of the candidates insisted could only be the work of a president, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Many of these legislative moments were attempts to confront and eradicate the
vestiges of slavery.
I think that all of us, regardless of our racial or ethnic background, feel relieved that we no longer have to deal with the
racism and the sexism associated with the system of slavery.
But we treat the history of enslavement like we treat the genocidal colonization of indigenous people in North America, as if
it was not that important, or worse, as if never really happened.
We think of it as a kind of nightmare. And, as is often the case
with nightmares, we try not to think about it except in abstract
terms, and we assume that it will go away. One of the amazing
contributions of a group of black women writers, beginning,
say, in the 1980s, was to think about slavery and to imagine the
subjectivities of persons who were enslaved and not allow us to
continue to think in these abstract categories.
The institution of the prison tells us that the nightmare of slavery continues to haunt us. If we actually learn how to recognize
the forms of racism and sexism that are at the structural core
of the prison system, that means we’ll have to develop a very
different idea about the state of democracy in the United States
of America, particularly with respect to its victories over racism
and sexism. We hear the Bush administration constantly evoking the civil rights movement as the completion of democracy
in the United States, American democracy.
The theme of this gathering is how to end cycles of oppression.
I want to talk about that by making the connection between
slavery and the contemporary prison system. First I want to say
that the emancipation that awaited enslaved people in 1863,
people whose history under slavery had been primarily a history of striving for freedom, was a constrained emancipation.
The joyful noise of freedom to which W. E. B. DuBois refers in
Black Reconstruction had to fend off the forms of unfreedom
that were tenaciously clinging to the emancipation offered to
the slaves. What did it mean to be a former slave who was free?
What did that freedom mean? DuBois talks about the spectacular dimensions of this newfound freedom, and there were
spectacular dimensions, because black people for the first
time had the freedom to learn, the freedom to try to get an education, the freedom to create schools, with what meager resources were there, the freedom to travel for the first time. But,
of course, this was a gendered freedom, because it was mostly
black men who were able to take advantage of the freedom to
travel.
They also had the sexual freedom to choose their own sexual
partners, which we might minimize today, but considering that
there were so many other dimensions of freedom that were not
available to the enslaved people who had been “set free,” that
sexual freedom became so important that it becomes the major theme of the first popular music to be produced in the aftermath of slavery: the blues.
Sexual freedom then becomes a metaphor for other kinds of
freedom, for political freedom, for economic freedom. But these
forms of freedom were shrouded in unfreedom. The enslavers
whose activity was abolished by the Emancipation Proclamation, and then later by amendment to the Constitution, did not
surrender so easily to words. It strikes me to be very strange
that over the decades we have assumed that it was possible to
abolish slavery simply by proclamation, a few words here, and
by a clause in the Constitution, when that proclamation and
that constitutional amendment never clearly explain how they
understand slavery.
So we don’t even clearly know what was supposed to be abolished. Was it chattel slavery? Was it treating human beings as
property? Human beings are still bought and sold and still treated as property, including people like Shaquille O’Neal, who just
got traded, right? Was it about coerced labor? We know there
is so much coerced labor, and we look at ways in which undocumented immigrants are treated and we see a very similar
mode of labor. As a result, I don’t think that the U.S. Constitution
successfully abolished coercive labor. What about the whole
scaffolding of racist ideology that was necessary to keep an
entire people enslaved? Did that get abolished? So why do we
assume that slavery was abolished?
Slavery was a part of the warp and woof of American life, especially in the South, but also in the North. And words alone were
not sufficient to make it go away. If slavery was declared dead,
it was simultaneously reincarnated through new institutions,
new practices, new ideologies. We can think about the ways
in which the institutions of punishment have served as receptacles for these structures and ideologies of enslavement that
were translated into the terms of freedom—slavery translated into the terms of freedom. What have these generations of
“freedom” meant since the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment? Both the prison and the fate of former slaves would be
inextricably linked to the struggle for democracy in this country.
So when we talk about the relationship between slavery and
the prison, we’re also talking about the nature of democracy, or
what goes under the rubric of democracy in this country.
Prison continues to reflect the closure of the doors of democracy to major sectors of the U.S. population. We can say that
one of the major aspects of slavery was social death. That
also included civil death. That meant that slaves could not participate in the political arena or in civil life. So what about felon
disenfranchisement today? What about the fact that there are
2.2 million people behind bars on any given day? Statistics can
be deceptive. Many of us know that figure, 2.2 million, but that
only reflects a census survey: It’s the average number of people
who are in prison on any given day. If you look at the number of
people who go in and out of the prison and jail system over the
course of a year, that’s going to be approximately 13 million people. So that’s much more vast than we have the habit of thinking
about.
The vast majority of these millions of people come from communities of color. This has to do with the increasingly restrictive and repressive nature of U.S. society. There is a majority of
black people in prison throughout the country, but if you look at
my state, California, the majority of people in California are Latinos and Chicanos.
The Structural Racism of the Prison
What’s very interesting is that people don’t get convicted anymore because they are black or because they are Chicano. But
there are structures of racism that makes race matter in terms
of determining who goes to prison, particularly who gets to go
to prison and who gets to go to colleges and universities. How
can we think about that structural racism? What is the relationship between the structural racism of slavery and the racism
that is inscribed in the very processes that create trajectories
that lead inevitably toward incarceration or higher education?
The structural racism of the prison can also be held responsible for the persistence of racism in the so-called free world. We
are encouraged to think about racial equality as produced by
adopting postures of color-blindness, right? We are told that all
One of the most influential photographers of the last half
century, Bruce Davidson is known for his compassionate
vision and empathy for his subjects. See photographs from
his most significant series, including those documenting the
civil rights movement in the North and the South, and the
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On view now through
September 11, 2016
Snøhetta expansion of the new SFMOMA; photo © Henrik Kam, courtesy SFMOMA
Bruce Davidson, Brooklyn Gang, 1959, 1959. Mid-vintage gelatin silver print.
Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, gift of Jerri Mattare. © Bruce Davidson/Howard Greenberg Gallery
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CONTRIBUTORS For March + April Issues of SFAQ, NYAQ, and AQ
Reprinted with permission from:
The Meaning of Freedom (City Lights Books, 2012)
Jepchumba is an African digital artist, curator and designer. She has been listed by
Forbes as one of the 20 Youngest Power Women in Africa and the Guardian Africa’s Top
25 Women Achievers. A digital cultural ambassador, Jepchumba is the founder of African
Digital Art, a collective where digital artists, enthusiasts and professional seek inspiration,
showcase their artists and connect with emerging artists. She promotes the growing culture of art and technology in Africa. She is passionate about creating unique digital experiences, solutions and strategies. The Meaning of Freedom
Metropolitan State College, Denver
February 15, 2008
Page 1 and 6
Senior Editors
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Angela Davis
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New Contemporary Poetry
Organized by Casey O'Neal
With: Nicole Trigg, John Sakkis, and Elaine Kahn
Page 6
The Rise Of African Digital Art
Jepchumba
Page 7
Style Wars: Shades Of Cool
Black Radical Aesthetics In The Face Of Heat
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Page 8
Indira Allegra
Sarah Biscarra Dilley
Page 9
Hera Büyüktaşçıyan
Arie Amaya-Akkermans
Page 10
Up From Contemporaneity;
Or, Why Do Curators Talk Like That? (Part 3)
John Rapko
Page 11
On Point 2.10:
Remembering James Albertson
Mark Van Proyen
Page 12
Move Your Archives
John Held, Jr.
Page 13
Millennial Collectors
Gary Yeh
In Conversation With Anna Hygelund
Page 14
Please Visit
sfaq.us
New York artist Walford Williams
Detail: ‘The Birthday Party’
deep lake art gallery
Summer Sale 25% off - enter code SFAQ 35
150 Paintings, Sculptures and Art Objects
Created by 100 Artists from 31 Countries
A Private Collection at Lake Tahoe, NV
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Nicole Archer, PhD is assistant professor in the history and theory of contemporary
art at the San Francisco Art Institute, where she also serves as the chair of the BA Department + Liberal Arts. She is currently writing a manuscript titled A Looming Possibility:
Towards a Theory of the Textile, which considers how textiles are used to produce and
maintain the limits of “legitimate” versus “illegitimate” forms of state violence.
Mark Van Proyen is an artist and art critic based in northern California. His writings
have appeared in Art in America, Art Issues, CAA Reviews, New Art Examiner, Bad Subjects, Art Practical, and Square Cylinder.
CONSTRUCTEDCOMMUNICATION
N A K AYA M A , S I N B O N D I T, V E N O M
A P R I L 9 – A U G U S T 7, 2 016
New voices in sign painting, ceramics, and quilting
Picking up threads of the handmade in our impersonal digital era, Kenji Nakayama,
Amy Sinbondit and Ben Venom utilize traditional craft techniques to construct objects
that communicate in nontraditional ways: through symbols, typography and gestures.
Anna Hygelund is a Senior Specialist in Contemporary Art at Paddle8. She has worked
in San Francisco, London and New York, where she is currently based. In addition to her
active role in auctions and private sales, Anna has written for SFAQ/NYAQ since 2014.
Jarrett Earnest is a writer living in New York City. He teaches and is faculty liaison at
Bruce High Quality Foundation University (BHQFU), New York’s freest art school.
Terri Cohn is a writer, curator, art historian, and fine art consultant. Her research and writings focus on conceptual and performance art, technology, public art, and socially engaged
art practices. She regularly contributes to various publications including SFAQ, Art Practical,
Public Art Review, Art in America, and caa.reviews. Terri conceived, co-wrote and edited Pairing of Polarities: The Life and Art of Sonya Rapoport (Heyday Press, 2012), and curated exhibitions of Rapoport’s work for Kala Art Institute and Mills College Art Museum. She teaches
core and interdisciplinary art history courses for the University of California, Berkeley, in their
Art and Design Extension program, and for the San Francisco Art Institute.
Sampada Aranke is an Assistant Professor in the History and Theory of Contemporary Art at the San Francisco Art Institute. Prior to SFAI, she was a Visiting Assistant Professor in Art History at the University of Illinois, Chicago. Her research interests include
performance theories of embodiment, visual culture, and black cultural and aesthetic
theory. Her work has been published in Art Journal, Equid Novi: African Journalism Studies, and Trans-Scripts: An Interdisciplinary Online Journal in the Humanities and Social
Sciences at UC Irvine. She’s currently working on her book manuscript entitled Death’s
Futurity: The Visual Culture of Death in Black Radical Politics.
Indira Allegra has threadless weavings up at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts as
part of Take this Hammer: Art + Media Activism from the Bay Area through August 14th.
She wraps up co-teaching the Queer Emerging Artists Residency (QEAR) in April alongside co-creator India Sky. QEAR is currently the only residency of its kind in the nation
- three monthsspecifically designed for queer and trans* artists ages 18-24 housed at
Destiny Arts Center inOakland. You can find her on Facebook and on Twitter and Instagram @indiraallegra or indiraallegra.com
SARAH BISCARRA-DILLEY is a multi-disciplinary artist, bruja, ‘axi. Her work explores
the spaces between the worlds; between blood sickness and bloodlines, between grief
and joy, between body and land, between the spatial and the temporal. She is anchored
in the intention and practices of indigenous resurgence: through cartographic upheaval,
through contradiction, through complexity, through communion. Using found footage,
cut paper, archival material, handwork, language and thread, she traces a landscape of
indigenous resilience and shifting relationships of belonging, displacement, and home.
Her work has been exhibited throughout the Americas; showcased by former Museum
of Contemporary Native Arts (MoCNA) curator Ryan Rice at the 2012 Native American
and Indigenous Studies Association’s (NAISA) annual meeting, co-presented the Sexuality Studies Association’s keynote lecture alongside Daniel Heath Justice at First People’s House, at the University of Victoria in 2013, negotiated the gifts and limitations of the
term "Two Spirit" at NAISA 2015, and continues creating liminal spaces alongside her
remarkable co-conjurers in Black Salt Collective. She is full of birds.
2569 Third Street, San Francisco | sfmcd.org
Co-curators: Ariel Zaccheo and JoAnn Edwards. Image: Amy Sinbondit, Diagram: Hand Movement, 2012, porcelain, terra sigillata, paint, rubber coated steel. Exhibitions and programs generously supported by the Windgate Charitable Foundation and Grants For The Arts/San Francisco Hotel Tax Fund. Ad designed by Gauger + Associates
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we have to do is not notice race and racism is going to leave, it
will go away. So there is a kind of learned ignorance, because
we can see race, but we know we are not supposed to see race.
There is a kind of repression that oftentimes produces these
many explosive expressions of racism. I can remember Michael
Richards saying, “I’m not a racist. I don’t even know where that
came from.” Increasingly, this is what people say. They can’t understand how it is that a racist observation escapes from their
lips. There is a whole psychic reservoir of racism in this country.
It’s in the structures, it’s in our collective psyche. All of us are affected by it. I’m not only talking about white people as the bearers of racism. I’m talking about ideologies and logics that inform
the way all of us relate to the world.
Prisons, of course, thrive on class inequalities, they thrive on
racial inequalities, they thrive on gender inequalities. They produce and reproduce those inequalities, because they segregate and isolate the individuals they punish. They also conceal
the inequalities that they reproduce. The hidden danger of relying on incarceration as the major solution to behaviors that are
often the by-products of poverty is that the solution reproduces
the very problem it purports to solve. This is how we might begin to understand why the prison population constantly rises,
not only in absolute numbers, but proportionately as well. It
has nothing to do with the rise in crime statistics. As the rate of
crime goes down, prison populations go up.
Of course, they reproduce these problems because funds almost inevitably migrate away from education and housing and
health care toward what they call corrections. Therefore, one
generation spawns another. The crime rate has fallen, but the
incarceration rate has risen. In the United States, of course, a
prison sentence on a felony charge is a life sentence, regardless of how many years one gets. It is a life sentence because of
what someone like Marc Mauer calls “collateral consequences”—the collateral consequences of imprisonment that lead
to social death, disenfranchisement. We wouldn’t have had
to deal with the Bush administration over the last seven years
had it not been for the case that due to felony disenfranchisement more than 600,000 people could not vote in Florida. In
the 2000 elections there was only a 537-vote difference. So if a
tiny minority of those 600,000 had been able to vote, we might
have had an entirely different course of history.
If the prison is proposed as a solution to social issues, then
other possibilities get excluded. Governor Schwarzenegger,
the governor of the state in which I live, changed the name of
the California Department of Corrections to the California Department of Rehabilitation and Corrections. If we really want rehabilitation, then we have to start talking about decarceration.
How is rehabilitation possible under conditions of total confinement? How is rehabilitation possible when there is no way that
people can exercise their freedoms? As a matter of fact, that’s
the whole point of the punishment as imprisonment: It deprives
you of your rights and liberties. That is why the prison is a peculiarly democratic punishment. It is the quintessential democratic institution, because it provides you with the negation of that
upon which the whole concept of bourgeois democracy has
been developed.
In our society, the assumption is that if you are from a certain
racialized community, you will have had some contact with the
prison system. There was an interesting study that was conducted by a sociologist who matched black and white pairs of
job applicants. Some of them indicated that they had a criminal
conviction and some of them didn’t. What was very interesting
was that white people who had a felony conviction were called
back for interviews at the same rate as black people who had
the same credentials but had no criminal record. The point that
Marc Mauer makes is that black men are essentially born with
the social stigma equivalent to a felony conviction. So we’re
talking about an institution that not only affects those it incarcerates; it has an influence on entire communities.
The problem is not limited to black men. Women constitute, and
have constituted for a while, the fasting-growing sector of the
imprisoned population. And women of color, of course, constitute the largest group of women, therefore the fastest-growing
population within the entire imprisoned population. This is not
just the case in the United States. It’s true in Canada, it’s increasingly true in Europe, and it’s true in other countries as well.
If we look at who is in prison and why they are there, then it’s
clear that race and class have much more to do with the overcrowding of these prison institutions than the existence of
crime. Once people have spent time in prison, they are forever
haunted by their status as prisoners. They are forever haunted
by civil death. They are forever excluded from certain aspects
of democratic participation in the society. So this is a way of understanding why black and Latino people are so easily labeled
criminal, so easily identified as threats to law and order, and it
helps us understand why people from those communities often
see their own sisters and brothers as the criminals, as the menaces and threats. The immigrant, for example, is scapegoated.
The undocumented immigrant is seen as the enemy.
And there is a racialization of immigration. The post-colonial,
post-Soviet, post-socialist immigration to this country involves
people arriving here from all over the world, especially from
Russia. But do we ever think about undocumented immigrants
as Russian? Do we ever racialize them as white? So we begin
to understand how the ideology of racism really infects the very
logic of our thought and our relations to one another.
I want to talk for a moment about how this criminalization process, particularly with respect to black people, is anchored in
slavery. And I want to make a connection between the democracy we think we now enjoy and the democracy that was offered to people of African descent in the aftermath of slavery.
Even during slavery there was a contradiction in the way black
people were thought about. We tend to think slavery meant
that black people were treated as property, right? That’s chattel
slavery. But then black people were punished, they were found
guilty of crime. Can property be accountable? Can property be
found culpable? There was something wrong there. As a matter
of fact, you can say that even though black people were not acknowledged as having legal personality in most senses, when
they committed a crime, they were accountable to the law, and
therefore they were acknowledged as having legal personality.
This negative affirmation of the legal personality of black people continues to hold sway today. You might say that the proof
of participation of black people in U.S. democracy is precisely
the fact that they have received due process before being sentenced in such disproportionate numbers to prison. It is precisely as they appear before the law as equal subjects who get
due process, precisely because they are considered accountable, or it’s through their culpability—does that make sense?—
through their culpability that they participate in the democratic
process. That reflects the contradiction of slavery, and that, I
think, is an indication of one of the ways in which slavery continues to haunt us.
Before I complete my presentation I have to say something
about corporate globalization. I have to say that corporate
globalization has become the major threat to democracy in
the world. But the problem is that capitalism represents itself
as synonymous with democracy. That is what George Bush
is talking about when he calls for the defense of democracy
against terror. That is the democracy that the U.S. military is
fighting to protect in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. It’s not democracy, it’s capitalism, or it’s a democracy that uses capitalism
as its model, that sees the free market as the paradigm for freedom and that sees competition as the paradigm for freedom.
Corporations are linked to the global marketing of imprisonment. They reap enormous profits in this area—prisons at the
expense of housing and health care and education and other
social services. As a matter of fact, the neoliberal conception
of economic freedom requires the government to withdraw
from virtually all social services. The market is supposed to
determine everything. Freedom emerges because the market
will determine the distribution of education, the distribution of
health care. And according to the Chicago boys, Milton Friedman and those people, it will even itself out. I guess they still believe in Adam Smith’s “invisible hand,” that somehow or another
freedom will reveal itself.
But when we look at the extent to which countries in the southern region have been devastated by the juggernaut of privatization, a country like South Africa, which is still, I suppose, our
hope for a non-racist and non-sexist and non-homophobic society, they’re experiencing enormous problems precisely as a
result of privatization that is required by the IMF and other international financial organizations as that which countries must do
who wish to get international loans. It’s really scary.
We see that kind of structural adjustment happen in this country. That is why we are confronted with this crisis of health care
and why health care has become totally privatized since the
1980s. There was an attempt to totally privatize the prison system as well. It worked in some places; it didn’t quite work in others. But we see the insinuation of private corporations into the
prison system all over this country.
I wonder why we do not find it utterly shameful that it is possible
now to visit countries in the global South and discover that while
their educational systems and housing subsidies and jobs have
deteriorated over the last quarter-century under the impact of
globalization, it is often possible to discover a shiny new prison that would lead one to believe that one had been teleported back to Colorado or California. Of course, we use the term
“prison-industrial complex” to point out that there is this global
proliferation of prisons and prisoners that is more clearly linked
to economic and political structures and ideologies than to individual criminal conduct and efforts to curb crime.
New Contemporary Poetry
Organized by Casey O'Neal
FROM MIRROR MAGIC
John Sakkis
FAILURE OF MALICE
Nicole Trigg
Tell you what
Exactly how I feel
Write you
There aren’t words
Phone you
It isn’t wrong
Call your softness
Cocked
As if knotted
Silence speaks
As if beaten by the knots
If it explodes
Radiate you
All the better
To arrive at the point
Unpleasantly
Surprise you
By the knots
Hoist my email
After hours
Close the door
Or wall of sounds
Or an action is over
Is not a failure
Or an action is imagined
By the knots
Or an action never ends
Tiny cries
Spikes of icicle
Melt against my heart
Instead, shoot you
A line with three points
I admire
Plus three Leaves, Twins
And a Squid
By the knots
The words and feelings
Multiply
Each one of these
Passes underneath
Inside bubbles’
Torn edges
Little rooms I’ve said
with my technology
In silence, a picture
We’re sharing
A brand new message
the same despair
A brand new sentience
Announce you
Arouse you
Or an action never seen
As many Diamond Rings
As you are old
I’m content to be left behind
it’s scary, actually
I was promised a jetpack
and boxes of candles
but the flame was not working
the tone of singularity
now seems too dramatic
like when Bob Grenier
said “I HATE SPEECH”
he meant technology
but that’s the kicker
it’s a self-canceling gesture
there can be no perception
w/o a perceiver,
and as we’ve seen
speech is a selfie
not easily shrugged off
the contemplatives retain
enough to perceive
as they rejoice,
I’m content
to be considerate of others
multi-authored, the loner
is a liar,
I am a media event
I wanted to say a few words about this prison-industrial complex that has this increasingly privileged place within the global
economy and the way in which it serves to support the persistence of racism, but also how it has become a gendering
apparatus. I don’t think we think about the fact that there are
prisons for men and there are prisons for women. What about
people who are gender-nonconforming? Because I think we’ve
learned over the last period that there are more than two genders. So what happens to them? Where do they go? Where
does a transgender woman get sent or a transgender man get
sent or someone who doesn’t necessarily identify as male or
female? Of course, the prisons rely on the old notions of biology, that biology has the answers for everything, so they inspect
people’s genitals. It’s based on the genitalia that they get classified as a certain gender and therefore sent to certain prisons.
Then, of course, there are problems with violence. People often
argue, well, if you send a transgendered woman to men’s prisons because she has male genitalia, she’s going to be subject
to rape, because we know, we think, that rape is something that
male prisoners begin to do once they go to prison. We don’t ask
ourselves why, where does that come from? We don’t ask ourselves about the extent to which the institution itself promotes
that violence, needs that violence, generates that sexual violence in order for the system to work. Then we see it happen
in Abu Ghraib and we see it happen in Guantánamo, and we
express such shock—this is not the way America is supposed
to operate. However, if we look at what happens on a daily basis
in the domestic prisons in this country, we see similar coercion
and violence.
Of course, women have been especially hurt by these developments. The prison industrial complex has brought in women
from the global South, indigenous women in disproportionate
numbers. If you go to Australia, who do you think you will discover in disproportionate numbers in the prisons there, in the
women’s prisons especially?
The prison-industrial complex has become so big and powerful that it works to perpetuate itself. It’s literally self- perpetuating. The raw materials are immigrant youth and youth of color
throughout the world. So if one visits a prison in Australia or
France, the Netherlands, Italy, Sweden, one sees young people who come from communities that we in the United States
designate as communities of color, we see indigenous people.
Race continues to matters a great deal throughout the world
today.
This is something that the United States has basically offered
to the world: a way of managing social problems by refusing to
confront them. Instead of solving issues, the system puts people behind bars. We can’t deny that there are people in prison
who have done horrible, hurtful things to others. But these aren’t
the majority of prisoners. And there are many people in the free
world who have done horrible, hurtful things. There are many
reasons why people engage in violence, sometimes out of malice, sometimes out of mental illness, sometimes out of self-defense. Many women who are in prison for committing violent
acts have killed in desperation in order to extricate themselves
from a violent intimate relationship. No matter what a person
has been convicted of, does it make sense to house hundreds,
sometimes thousands of people together, or separately in isolation cells, deprive them of contact with their families, deprive
them of education, and then assume that this is going to help
rehabilitate them and help them be a healthy part of society?
I’d like to end with questions. How do we imagine and struggle
for a democracy that does not spawn forms of terror, that does
not spawn war, that does not need enemies for its sustenance?
Because people who are in prison are pointed to as the enemies of society, and that is one of the ways in which we can define our own sense of ourselves as free, by looking at those who
are our opposites. How do we imagine a democracy that does
not thrive on this racism, that does not thrive on homophobia,
that is not based on the rights of capitalist corporations to
plunder the world’s economic and social and physical environments?
I suggest we use our imaginations to try to come up with versions of democracy in which, for example, the practice of Islam
does not serve as a pretext for incarceration in an immigration
detention facility or in a military prison, where torture and sexual coercion are not considered appropriate treatment. We need
to use our imaginations to envision versions of democracy that
allow for many things: the right to decent, fulfilling employment
and a living wage; the right to quality education; the right to live
in a world where education is not a commodity, but rather a creative discipline that allows us to understand all the worlds we
inhabit, both human and nonhuman, the kind of education that
compels us to transcend the limits of nationalist patriotism in
order to imagine ourselves as citizens of the globe.
Reprinted with permission from:
The Meaning of Freedom (City Lights Books, 2012)
BY THE TIME I ARRIVED
Elaine Kahn
He spent hours
mouthing as he chewed
His hands smelled like ketchup
I wanted to wipe them
on the clean braid
of the beautiful woman
who had sat beside us
Jepchumba
It is hard to believe that only a few years ago people around the
world couldn’t conceive of African digital art. Perhaps it was
out of sheer ignorance, or a long history of a continent misunderstood, but there was a widely held assumption that Africa
had been left out of digital life. If you Googled “Africa” 10 years
ago, you would probably have come across: a map of Africa,
The Lion King, wilderness and safari photography, and “poverty porn” with its attendant images of hungry children, war,
disease, and strife. But inside roadside Internet cafes, or in
local stores where you could purchase data bundles, a quiet
revolution was taking place.
Internet technology, like everywhere else in the world, was
radically transforming culture. Kenyans formed informal communities like #KOT—Kenyans on Twitter—banding together
in conversation over the latest scandal. In Nigeria, MP3s were
downloaded and shared illegally, creating pop sensations that
would soon take the global stage—artists like P-Square and
D’Banj. Traversing through the silicon savannas, digital explorers mounted their curated discoveries on sites like Pinterest or
Tumblr. Every month, it seemed like a new blog was formed:
Africa is A Country, Another Africa, Nigerian Nostalgia, Afro-Punk, Everyday Africa.1 Catchy phrases like “Africa is Now,
Africa is the Future,” developed and solidified within our online
consciousness. The rise of an online Africa was also marked
with the rise of global exhibitions around the world, from the
2015 Venice Biennale curated by an African, Okwui Enwezor,
to the 1-54 Contemporary Art Fair, in New York, and now more
recently the Armory Focus: African Perspectives exhibition.
A New Canvas For The African Artists
African artists and designers took note of the sudden push online, and embraced social media platforms. For artists like the
Kenyan musical group, Just A Band, digital culture was seductive . . . you could be in touch with anyone, everywhere, all at
once, in real time. For Just A Band, the Internet was a distinct
way to connect to those of a similar tribe—not bound within
geographical restrictions or political affiliations, but rather tech
savvy Millennials who had grown up with global media phenomena like Daft Punk, Naruto, and good old Clint Eastwood.
Digital technology and Internet accessibility lead to their creation of Kenya’s first viral video “Ha He” in 2009, a music video
depicting their Kenyan revision of Dirty Harry’s phrase “Make
My Day.”
For culture and tastemakers, Instagram facilitated art directors like Rharha Nembhard (@dronegoddess) and new imaginings of African culture that could be shared, tweeted and
liked across the globe; African identity was fusing with other
cultures and extending the African diaspora to new territories.
This digital cultural revolution extended past the visual and into
political discussions. Artists participated in a new medium by
openly criticizing government institutions as well as interrogating the rise of social media platforms in their countries. Khalid
Albaih, a Sudanese political cartoonist, rose to prominence
during the early stages of the Arab Spring protests in 2011. Albaih predominantly creates his cartoons through digital media
and shares them through social media. The Internet affords
artists like Albiah a way to speak out against political regimes
and openly criticize religious institutions in ways that would
have once cost him his life in Sudan. Albaih is just one of the
many African digital artists who understand the influence of
digital media but are also skeptical of the medium.
The Legacy of Imperialism and Colonialism on the
World Wide Web
In 2011, the a United Nations report declared “that disconnecting people from the Internet is a human rights violation
and against international law.”2 While the net neutrality debate
rages on, Africa is often left out of the discussion. Dubious initiatives from Facebook, like Internet.org, hope to “bridge the
digital divide” by providing regulated “free Internet” to everyday
Africans. Yet, the Internet in Africa will never be neutral. The
historical, social, cultural, and economic implications are felt as
digital users pay the high cost of fiber optic undersea cables
that reveal the imbalance of power. Sub-Saharan countries
dish out high premiums for access to international pipelines.
The true implications of the digital divide is not lost on South
African digital art collective NTU. For the collective, the discussion of Internet accessibility goes beyond a more connected
Africa. Bogosi Sekhukhuni, Nolan Oswald Dennis, and Tabita
Rezaire see the Internet as a highly problematic medium. NTU
describes itself as “an agency concerned with the spiritual futures of the Internet,” dedicated to “provide decolonial therapies for the digital age” and to “enhance intersubjective virtual
user possibilities.”
In an interview with OkayAfrica, Tabita Rezaire put it bluntly:
“The Internet is exploitative, oppressive, exclusionary, classist,
patriarchal, racist, homophobic, transphobic, fatphobic, coercive and manipulative. The Internet reproduces IRL fuck ups
Yaniss Ghanem and Mustapha Sellali, Algérie Retro-futur, 2014. Online portfolio of manipulated photographs. Courtesy of the Internet.
i.e. western racial, economical, political, and cultural domination, legitimized behind the idea of modernity and technological advancement. It promotes occidental hegemony; brainwashes its users, whitewashes information, and is an active
tool of surveillance, propaganda, censorship and control.”3
The Future of African Digital Art
In 2016 there are 120 million Facebook users each month in Africa. The majority of them come from Nigeria (15 million), South
Africa (12 million) and Kenya (4 million). South Africans surpass
the global average time spent on online social networks with
an average of 3.2 hours while the global average is 2.4 hours.
These statistics translate to the change in perceptions of Africa. No longer do you just see The Lion King while searching for
African content. Today, digital art is a highly embraced medium. From software to hardware, digital artists are experimenting with technology. From augmented reality and virtual technology to conceptual art and 3D gaming, the digital revolution
continues.
Eddy Kamuanga Ilunga, Lost, 2015. Acrylic and oil on canvas,
200 x 200 centimeters. Courtesy of the Internet.
1) http://africasacountry.com/, http://www.anotherafrica.net/, http://
nigerianostalgia.tumblr.com/, http://www.afropunk.com/, http://everydayafrica.tumblr.com/
2) http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/06/united-nations-declares-internet-access-a-basic-human-right/239911/
3) http://www.okayafrica.com/news/tabita-rezaire-cyber-warrior-e-colonialism/
Mouthing as he opened up
the packet nursing
folds to tiny noses
he is waiting
for a call
but I
will fuck
the face
of any man
who looks
away
Khalid Albaih, Charity #Sudan, 2014. Courtesy of the Internet.
Glove eyes leave you
nothing special
A painting of a tongue
covered in sand
needs no explanation
I will run
my fingers
through your dark
fermenting hair
This is a blank spot
a black fricative slowly repeating
and I do work and he does nothing
From Woman In Public, published by City Lights.
Page 6 [AQ Issue 5]
The Rise Of
African Digital Art
Tabita Rezaire, Afro Cyber Resistance, 2014.
Khalid Albiah, #BreakTheInternet #ISIS and #AlQaeda Unite, 2014.
Courtesy of the Internet.
Page 7 [AQ Issue 5]
Style Wars:
Shades Of Cool
Indira Allegra
Sarah Biscarra Dilley
Black Radical Aesthetics In
The Face Of Heat
I became familiar with Indira Allegra’s work through an interwoven map of relationships: through good friends who are
like family, through raffles at powwows, and on the threads
of conversation that connected and reconnected me to her
varied and dynamic visual works. When my collaborators and
I, as Black Salt Collective, were in the earliest stages of planning our first large-scale curatorial project, Visions into Infinite
Archives, we began by just chatting about the artists close by
in our lives and on the periphery, a meandering process that
mapped these expanding webs of relationships. It was beautiful, actually—a reminder of so many sparks of connection that
anchor and support, inspire, and incite us as artists, as healers,
as future ancestors.
Sampada Aranke
The fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent famously quipped that
“fashions fade, style is eternal.” This enigmatic statement does
much to elucidate the powerful place that style holds in many
contemporary cultures. In particular, it alerts us to the relationship that exists between notions of style and notions of history.
Or, to the idea that “to have style” is to have the means of inserting oneself into history, while “to lack style” is to risk oblivion.
This column, Style Wars, suggests that the tracing of style’s
fluctuating movements across varied social, political, aesthetic, and philosophical terrains is important work, and that this is
particularly true within the realms of fine art, design, art history, and visual studies (as many important figures within these
fields have long vied to claim and contest the ownership of this
term). Style Wars aims to appreciate how thinking about style
can offer opportunities to think across sets of subjectivities and
cultural practices that are often disassociated or pitted against
one another. This installment of Style Wars, written by guest
contributor Sampada Aranke, focuses on a question of the cool. Popular wisdom suggests that "being cool" is a mode of
self-possession and comportment that is so utterly singular that
it is as undefinable as it is unlocatable: "Coolness" as an ineffable, history-less kind of style.
Aranke critically complicates this commonly held belief. Her
essay deploys a genealogy of "the cool" that has clear, ancient
roots—stemming from the African continent and extending
throughout the modern black diaspora. Her essay pays special
attention to the way that "being cool" has historically provided a
means of resistance and survival. Along the way, it suggests that
the acceptance of "the cool" as a definition-less and universal
aesthetic is a strategic denial of blackness, orchestrated both
explicitly and implicitly in the name of white supremacy.
-Nicole Archer, Column Editor
This October will mark the 50th anniversary of the founding of
the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense (BPP), a Black radical organization whose revolutionary self-fashioning not only
imaged what Black liberation might look like, but also how cool
politics could be. From its inception, the BPP dedicated itself to
eradicating racial capitalism and its attendant white supremacist policies, practices, and power. Half a century since the Party’s founding, it seems clear that the BPP became a target of
the state not only because of the Panthers’ calls for revolution
and community organizing, but also because of their relentless and resistant “coolness.” The BPP’s Black revolutionary
form of self-styling was so intense, such a collective political
force, that it was, itself, dangerous to a racist status quo.
The BPP’s coolness was forged, not simply in the heat of the
moment, but as the art historian Robert Farris Thompson explains in his seminal essay “An Aesthetic of the Cool,” through
the activation of a venerable Black diasporic practice that was
strong enough to survive the extreme violences of the Middle Passage. For Thompson, “cool”—being it, having it, embodying it—is a Black aesthetic or a mode of comportment,
or being, retained from the continent of Africa. The power of
“being cool” is found in its ability to be traced back to various
and varying African continental ancestral practices that transgress cartographic constraints, tribal affiliations, and historical
eras. While at first read Thompson’s study might present itself
as a romantic desire for an “authentic” or “essential” African
aesthetic, we might instead embrace Thompson’s essay as an
articulation of coolness as a Black diasporic practice.
“Coolness” is practiced diasporically as a literal cooling of
self (individual or collective) by controlling and relieving heat.
These material practices (from funerary rituals in Dahomey
that consist of smashing pottery and soothing the land with
water to the Gāpeoples’ understanding that God reveals himself in rain as means of achieving balance and communication)
can be “extended metaphorically to include composure under
fire.”1 To be under fire and maintain one’s cool—to be under
the threat of fire and to maintain one’s cool—is very much an
essential factor of being Black in the U.S. Therefore, being cool
manifests a version of the self as tempered, composed, distanced from the actual hot circumstances that enrage, agitate,
and make it nearly impossible to live without the heat always
being on you. Within that unbearable heat—that unbearable
white heat that puts Black life under constant fire—one must
maintain their cool, keep cool, be cool, stay cool.
Just think of the discourses surrounding the murders of Rekia Boyd, Mike Brown, Tarika Wilson, Oscar Grant, Sean Bell,
Amadou Diallo, Tamir Rice, or any of the other 1140 Black people shot and killed in 2015 alone by police fire in the U.S.2 While
news sources spin tales that those killed by police were out of
control threats to the police, the burden is placed on Black subjects to keep calm in the face of extreme terror and impending
murder. This might approximate how cool as a diasporic practice is a means of survival with no guarantee.
Published in 1973, Thompson’s essay on the cool appears at
the political moment in which Black Power was folded into
the national imaginary as a revolutionary possibility for Black
Americans on the one hand, and as a viable threat to white
sanctity and state power on the other. More recently, the art
historian Krista Thompson has worked to take Robert Farris
Thompson’s notion of the cool to another limit. In “A Sidelong
Glance: The Practice of African Diaspora Art History,” she
suggests that a Black aesthetics of cool is all about throwing
shade.3 We can see those “sidelong glances” all over the art
historical canon, where Black subjects (if pictured at all) are
pictured in the margins, are looking out of the corner of their
eyes at the white subject of the scene. While these canonical
images of Black subjects were never meant to celebrate the
coolness of Blackness, the sidelong glances activated by
these subjects exceed the racist logics that trap these figures
into a white supremacist image, and instead make available a
modality of Black resistance. This sidelong glance—or averted eye or eye roll—is a kind of throwing shade, a way of looking that keeps cool while activating dissent.4 Krista Thompson
notes how these glances are not limited to those pictured, but
also are mobilized by those picturing. Contemporary Black
artists also throw shade on an art history that merely delimits
Black presence to the maids and minstrels on the margins by
centralizing coolness and shade as a primary strategy to image Blackness in ways otherwise unseen. Throwing shade,
like cool, is a Black mode of style, a Black aesthetic revolt, a
mode of Black being that survives otherwise.
Kathleen Cleaver and Black Panther co-founder Bobby Seale (right)
at a “Free Huey" rally in Oakland, California in the summer of 1968. Photograph by Howard Bingham. Courtesy of the Internet.
Chris Ofili’s Blue paintings deploy coolness and throwing
shade as a primary Black aesthetic strategy of resistant visibility. These paintings materialize black and blue hues that flick
as if caught in moonlight, ebb and flow like waves and make
shadow and figure fold into each other making one indistinguishable from the other. Ofili paints shade as an unwavering
ability to keep heat at an approximate distance. In Iscariot
Blues (2006), deep blues make barely perceptible a bluedblack, blacked-blue figure that hangs from a tree as similarly
hued musicians play what we can only hear as the blues itself.
This canvas embodies the shadow history of lynching. The
entire linen canvas is bruised—one giant bruise hanging on
a wall, limp and contorted like the figure himself. Artist Peter
Doig calls Ofili’s depiction of this brutal scene a “nonchalant
attitude”—a cool rendering of something enraging.5 The “ability to be nonchalant at the right moment” is central to diasporic
coolness for Robert Farris Thompson, and it is also central to
how shade mobilizes a means of “visual opacity,” or “that which
is not easily revealed, made visible, transparently present,” for
Krista Thompson.6 For Ofili, this feeling of nonchalance, this
cool that Doig feels, conveys a “mood” where the “imagery
comes out slowly . . . as a way to subvert the stark imagery.”7
Not an image of clarity, ready to be consumed, the shade
makes it such that the figures are hard to see, not readily available for us to take in. We have to work, squint our eyes, change
our glance. This shade is thrown at us at the level of the canvas
itself, subsumes us, makes it such that we know someone lives
and dies, sings and moans in that painting, somewhere in the
cool hues of blacks and blues.
In the face of this, I want us to think of coolness and its attendant strategy of throwing shade as a Black diasporic practice
that is at once political and aesthetic. Not a conflation of the
two—not the aestheticization of politics, the emptying and
hollowing out of politics so that it merely becomes an image
that one can buy, sell, and co-opt—but rather a simultaneous
invocation of how politics can allow us to imagine, and even at
times embody, a resistant social image, a revolutionary artistic
style, and a transgressive aesthetic modality. 8
Black radicals in the ’60s and ’70s turned to every political,
economic, and cultural mechanism at hand to mobilize an aesthetics of Blackness that turned its back on white supremacist
logics and their attendant racist stereotypes that made it near
impossible to image one’s Blackness as powerful. While a kind
of Black cool had long been in circulation before 1960s Black
radicals became highly visible, there are many ways in which
their manifestation of cool recalled these diasporic practices
and injected them with a new method of performing calmness
in the midst of terror—methods including throwing shade.9
Born out of a Black radical commitment to revolution and the
end of racial capitalism as we know it, we might say that coolness re-emerged in the 1960s as a kind of survival strategy.
This model of survival is a self-fashioning that included discipline, distance, and determination in which arms served as but
one mechanism for ensuring collective preparation.
This model of self-defense, which necessitated a critical distance where one could reveal “no emotion in situations where
excitement and sentimentality are acceptable,” was a way to
style oneself in the face of insurmountable heat. 10 This critical
coolness was crucial for Black radical subjectivity.
Following their founding in fall 1966, the Black Panther Party
armed themselves and followed, watched, and patrolled the
heat, i.e. the Oakland Police Department. This mode of counter-surveillance tracked and combated police violence locally, and spurred similar initiatives nationally. Panthers would
intervene in police brutality by watching police activity at a
near distance, standing ready for action, armed for self-defense. These patrols acted as training grounds, where Panthers staged self-defense by presence alone, firing back was
always a threat, always a possibility. Their tempered composure—best exemplified by Kathleen Cleaver’s shade-wearing crossed arm stance and Bobbly Seale’s shade throwing
lean—was a kind of cool necessary for self-defense.
It’s no coincidence that the BPP’s first public appearance as
an organization was an anti- police violence rally following the
April 1967 murder of Denzil Dowell by North Richmond police,
who fired multiple rounds, and eventually killed the 22 year-old.
The police, as many scholars have charted, are gatekeepers
of white supremacist investments, and embody the markings
of such investments. 11 By 1967, images of the police beating,
fire-hosing, and using their dogs to attack Black people were
frequently represented in popular media. It was commonplace to see the police mobilize force against Black bodies
every day.12 These images, which pictured the heat uniformed
and sealed with their crested badges and holstered guns,
made official the extent to which the police protected white
supremacist interests at any cost. The BPP image provided
a counter-aesthetic—one that relied on the Blackness of the
black leather jacket and beret to uniform another self, a collective self that played it cool in the face of such intense heat.
The BPP knew what kind of intense, raging violence the cops
were capable of, so they patrolled the police from a distance,
all the while self-fashioned in an easily identifiable way. We can
think of watching the heat, watching the police, as a means of
controlling one’s own heat. Crucial to this was also an activation of shade. Wearing shades, throwing shade, that sidelong
glance that is all too familiar. To throw shade—that sidelong
glance, that averted look—is to radically use one’s cool. The
BPP knew how to work an image, and mobilized their militant
collective self-fashioning as a manifestation of everything the
police were not—“clear-headed and organized,” ultimately a
“type of cool-headedness” that countered the hot-headed,
reckless, and murderous police.13
Perhaps this cool can partially account for why, in 1968, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover called the BPP the “greatest threat to
the internal security of the country.”14 In a joint effort to discredit and destroy the BPP and other movements for Black liberation, the FBI, in conjunction with local police around the country, started the Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO)
aimed to intimidate, eradicate, and incarcerate Black radicals.15
Many Black radicals are still locked up due to their political organizing during the 1960s, and many of them were accused of
police murder. Cool-headedness was such a threat to white
Anne-Louis Girodet Trioson, Jean-Baptiste Belley, député de SaintDomingue à la Convention, 1797. Oil on canvas, 158 x 111 centimeters.
Collection of the Château de Versailles. Courtesy of the Internet.
supremacy, that those framed for violence against the police
continue to serve out inhumane sentences, many of whom
have spent the majority of their lives in solitary confinement.
Jessica Millward writes that Mumia Abu-Jamal, notable Black
radical political prisoner, prison abolitionist, and political philosopher, “comes off cool; a Philly cool; a Black Panther cool;
a necessary prison cool.”16 Cool on the outside, but warm on
the inside is how Millward goes on to describe Abu-Jamal. The
threat of this coolness coupled with this internal warmth—a
heat rising, but tempered and leveled as a means of survival—might be precisely why state narratives describe Abu-Jamal as “cold.” We might think of the state’s rhetoric use of the
phrase “cold blooded killer” to fictitiously describe Abu-Jamal
as but one strategy in legitimizing his incarceration. 17
But Abu-Jamal represents the opposite of coldness. In fact, his
entire life has been dedicated to seeing through the liberatory project of the Black radical vision that led to his incarceration. Maintaining his cool behind bars, embodying that critical
distance that makes this particular Black diasporic practice a
strategy of survival, Abu-Jamal says, “They haven’t stopped
me from doing what I want every day. I believe in life, I believe in
freedom, so my mind is not consumed with death.”18 This is exactly the kind of cool described by the Gola of Liberia as “to act
as though one’s mind were in another world . . .”19 Abu-Jamal
embodies a project of Black radical world making to imagine
oneself as capable of being free, of a liberation so radical that it
can live beyond the scope of this unbearable world.
1) Robert Farris Thompson, “An Aesthetic of Cool,” African Arts, Volume 7, Number 1, 1973, page 41.
2) The Guardian’s The Counted series documents those killed by police in the U.S. As of February 17th, 2006, 127 Black people have been
killed in police custody. See: http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/
ng-interactive/2015/jun/01/the-counted-police-killings-us-database#
3) Thompson, Krista. “A Sidelong Glance: The Practice of African
Diaspora Art History in the United States.” The Art Journal. 70.(2011):
7-31.
4) Ibid, 26.
5) Peter Doig and Chris Ofili in BOMB Magazine, Fall 2007, http://
bombmagazine.org/article/2949/peter-doig-chris-ofili
6) Thompson, Robert Farris, “An Aesthetic of Cool,” African Arts, Volume 7, Number 1, 1973, page 41 and Thompson, Krista. “A Sidelong
Glance: The Practice of African Diaspora Art History in the United
States.” The Art Journal. 70.(2011): 20. For more on opacity as a central concept in African diasporic modes of survival, see Édouard Glissant, and Betsy Wing. Poetics of Relation. Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 1997.
7) Peter Doig and Chris Ofili in BOMB Magazine, Fall 2007, http://
bombmagazine.org/article/2949/peter-doig-chris-ofili
8) We have only to think of the 2016 Super Bowl Halftime show (sponsored by Pepsi), where Beyoncé mobilized the image of the Black
Panther Party for Self Defense portion of the show. Short-shorts, thigh
garters, and high heels accompanied Panther style berets and even a
faux ammunition belt for Beyoncé herself. This strange amalgamation
combined an added layer of unease, as Beyoncé performed her song
Formation, lauded by some as an embrace of her Blackness, and critiqued more pointedly by others for her appropriation of Black queer
life and culture. This aestheticization of a Black radical image of cool
literally transforms the bullet into a belt, and makes it such that the
shield that ammunition was meant to be becomes a strange accessory. See: http://radfag.com/2016/02/10/my-apparently-obligatory-response-to-formation-in-list-form/
9) Coolness extended before and beyond the 1960s. In a sense, coolness is a retained Black diasporic practice evidenced by the work
of figures such as Sojourner Truth and Robert Johnson, and movements such as the Harlem Renaissance to the Black Emergency
Cultural Coalition. To say that “an aesthetic of coolness” re-emerges
is to account for its cyclical politics of cultural inheritance within Black
diasporas.
11) For more on the historical relationship between police and white
supremacy, see Steve Martinot and Jared Sexton. “The Avant-Garde
of White Supremacy.” Social Identities, 9.2 (2003): 169-181; Bryan Wagner, Disturbing the Peace: Black Culture and the Police Power After
Slavery. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2009; Amy L.
Wood, Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 1890-1940, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009;
Orisanmi Burton, “To Protect and Serve Whiteness.” North American
Dialogue, 18.2 (2015): 38-50.
12) Martin A. Berger, Seeing Through Race: A Reinterpretation of Civil
Rights Photography, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011.
13) Collective Statement by the Connecticut 9, Political Prisoners,
published in The Black Panther, May 2, 1970.
14) See Ward Churchill and Jim VanderWall, Agents of Repression:
The FBI’s Secret Wars against the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement, Cambridge, Mass: South End Press, 2008 and
Liz Derias, Andres Alegria, Lincoln Bergman, Muhammad Ahmad,
Kathleen Cleaver, Ward Churchill, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Elmer G.
Pratt, José E. López, Ricardo Romero, Akinyele O. Umoja, and Laura
Whitehorn, Cointelpro 101, Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2011.
15) Ibid.
16) Jessica Millward, “Mumia: Vulnerability and Hope,” The Feminist
Wire, January 23, 2014, http://www.thefeministwire.com/2014/01/mumia-vulnerability-and-hope/
17) Paul Waldman, “The Mythological Cold-Blooded Killer,” The American Prospect, March 7, 2014, http://prospect.org/article/mythological-cold-blooded-killer.
18) Laura Smith, “‘I spend days preparing for life, not for death’,”
The Guardian, October 25, 2007, http://www.theguardian.com/
world/2007/oct/25/usa.laurasmith.
Allegra was one of the first artists that came to my mind to be
included in the exhibition. Her embodied and visual weavings
feel inextricably tied to her work as a wordsmith, as a storyteller and truth-sayer; some even incorporate these writings into
the literal warp and weft of the textiles. These deep relationships between mediums make her visual work so conceptually rich; the interdependence of text and textile provides generative ground upon which to challenge the limitations of both.
One example of many is Blackout, a digital weaving installation
which documents ongoing and escalating police violence by
creating spatial environments of the testimony from family
members of those slain by police and serge twill—the fabric
commonly used to make police uniforms—calling grief, silence and embodied legacies of violence to the forefront. The
powerful collaboration of narrative elements in her practice
create conversations in and between opposing worlds.
I reached out to her to follow threads of conversation in a
shared document through the Internet ether, just before the
opening reception of Take This Hammer: Art and Media Activism at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, where Black out will be
installed through August 14th, 2016.
At so many Native community events, conversations
begin with questions like “What tribe are you from?”
and “Who are your parents?”, “Where did you grow
up?”, and “Do you know so-and-so?” These contexts of knowing each other are so foundational to
basic conversations; this mapping of relationships
is part of everyday work. In this spirit, can you share
some of these relationships? Who are your people?
Where are you from?
Yes of course. I was born in Detroit, Michigan and grew up
in Portland, Oregon before moving to Oakland, California in
my mid-20s. My mother’s people are from towns scattered
throughout Georgia and Biloxi, Mississippi. They are Black—
descendants of mixed tribal origin from peoples along the
west coast of Africa who were forced into chattel slavery on
Cherokee, Chicasaw, Choctaw, Creek, Seminole, and Natchez
land. They survived by sharecropping, doing domestic work,
and working cures when they needed from the land. My father’s people are descendant from Cherokees living in Athens,
Georgia and Bessemer City, North Carolina (two hours outside of Cherokee, NC)—they survived by mixing with non-Indians and learning how to assimilate into a growing, dominant
white culture. My father’s people also come from African descendant foremothers raped by Irishmen while working on
plantations and caring for white children in white homes. I am
ascendant from all this and as such influenced by Rabbit Trickster tales, jazz aesthetics, the sense of animacy in all things,
the importance of literacy, blues, decorum, and cornbread.
Who are some of your teachers, mentors, and
influences? How does this shape or ground your
practice?
As for teachers, I have to appreciate Dario Robleto for his work
on materialist poetry, Josh Faught for his wealth of knowledge
of weaving and queer craft, and Oriana Bolden who introduced me to the basics of video production and editing. I need
to thank Tirza Latimer for her support. A big wado to Jacquie
Archambeau for her knowledge and love of Cherokee culture
and people and Kim Shuck for her uncompromising Cherokee
poetic. A big wado to Qwo Li-Driskill for hir fearless scholarship on Asegi people (Cherokee Queer & Two-Spirit people).
A signed and silent thank you to Jeska Duckworth, an activist in the Deaf, Queer community in Portland for teaching me
American Sign Language, and Mark Azure (Chippewa-Cree/
Dakota and Tsimshian), an elder in the Deaf Native community in Oregon, for supporting me to become the first person
of color ever to graduate from my Sign Language interpreting
program back in 2005. I would be remiss if I did not also thank
Catherine Dubois (Métis) for her overall wisdom and kindness
and for teaching me to be of better service to Deaf/Blind people—and thus all people.
Thank you for being so generous with this response!
The naming of relationships, of place, of shared
knowledge, of guiding spirit is so moving to me; it
provides a span of influence, lineage and, as you so
beautifully direct us to, ascendancy that extends
through time.
The temporal nature of your work, from material to
medium to narrative, is really powerful to me. Can
you talk a bit about how time influences what you
refer to as the performance of your work?
I am not convinced that time is entirely linear. When one experiences the grief of displacement (from your land/home/body/
relationship), you don’t ever “get over it.” There is no getting
over it—no redemptive narrative to achieve, only a changing
distance from the initial pain of loss from your life. I believe that
while we may feel as though we are moving forward, we may
actually be spiraling outward orbiting points of grief in our lives
from a different perspective. I experience art making in this
way wherein my body passes through a point of contact with
a material or passes through a point of inquiry repetitively until
I begin to notice my changing distance (emotionally, ideologically, physically) from the work.
Blackout (detail), 2015. Digital weaving installation. Variable dimensions. Courtesy of the artist.
Wow. That’s a moving way of relating to your process. That ethereal motion and shifting intention is
definitely palpable in the work of yours I’ve had the
privilege of encountering.
While sitting with the pieces you’d installed during
Visions into Infinite Archives, I found your work to
create a defined yet open space, each weaving
speaking to the others like an old friend and inviting you to listen in. But it also was disorienting, with
portals to lose yourself through and constellations
tracing displacement, migration, home, all of these
cartographies of shifting relationships, spatial rupture, and reunion—the textiles in conversation
created a place between the present moment and
a thousand moments before and after. It felt atmospheric.
Thank you for sharing that. Sometimes, I have this feeling of being pushed and pulled through space with some of my works
and I imagine it is a way for me to understand what is threadlike
about myself—shifting back and forth over the breast beam of
the loom.
Building on what you articulate as that shifting
movement, why do you acknowledge the act of
weaving as a performance? How does this interact
with the other kinds of performance you do?
Performance implies the presence of a witness (even if the
only witness is the performer themselves through the lens of
a camera). In acknowledging the act of weaving as a performance, I acknowledge the animacy of the cloth that is witness
to its weaving and the body of the loom that holds the tension
of my exertion. This acknowledgement creates space for the
labor of weaving to be elevated as an art itself apart from the
typical focus on the object created. Performance art has a long
history of investment in art which resists commodification, and
it cannot be easily purchased due to its ephemeral nature. Performance art also eschews linear narratives which makes it a
useful technology—like poetry—to explore experiences that
never fully seem to leave us, but rather shape us though time.
What is the importance of text in your work? How do
your practices as a visual artist and as a writer influence each other? Is this a significant collaboration
in your process?
The word text is rooted in the Latin verb texere, which means
“to weave.” I am a writer and performance artist thinking
through craft, generating texts that exist as material documents and time-based works. Documents legitimize our bodies in face of religious, legal, medical and educational institutions. It is through the intermediary of the document that we
stake a claim for authorities to accept or deny us, to sanction
our bodies or our claim to our homes, or leave us vulnerable—unsanctioned for the privileges of citizenship, or rights
to accommodation, aid or physical sovereignty. I worry about
the sole reliance on the production and performance of alphanumeric text when responding to documents when filling
them out. I have to ask if an overreliance on alphanumeric text
limits what aspects of human experience can be considered in
a document and if so, what other kinds of literacy are required
to understand more about the unique vulnerabilities each of
us have to offer. As someone who has training as a Sign Language interpreter, it makes sense to me to look to the body for
alternate modes of text production, to build meaning through
repetitive gestures—a process not unlike textile production.
We chatted briefly about your upcoming residency in
Berlin this summer. I was floored by your idea to use
this performative medium to literally test the tensile
strength of a document, the Universal Declaration of
Human Rights, adopted by the General Assembly of
the UN, to speak to the dire unliveability of the United States as a Black and Native woman. How did you
come to this intersection of art and policy?
I am drawn to Berlin as it has become a laboratory for the impact of an “open door” policy on refugee crisis. I believe that
the issue of refugee crisis will be an ongoing one with the presence of Syrian refugees raising complex questions about the
role of neighboring nations to provide asylum, to the prospect
of climate refugees losing their countries to the rising waters
of global warming or global debt. We must all imagine what it
could be like to need refugee status.
Thinking broadly, I’m curious about the future of who will qualify for asylum and how this need for asylum could be adequately measured. Might the written word be insufficient to articulate
experiences of trauma in an application for refugee status?
How else might a case for refugee status be recorded? As
an artist, I seek to question the limits of Germany’s open door
policy and explore how this could be further stretched conceptually to include an open door to unconventional forms of
documentation in asylum cases and unconventional ways of
perceiving who needs asylum.
Can you talk more about how you will to engage this
work and the document it reimagines? What are its
implications?
If a working-class, Queer, Black and Native Femme needed
asylum, what documents, or international bodies would be
strong enough to act on her behalf? What would she be asked
to prove in her application and what resources could she use
to stake her claim?
The work I will be developing on residency is Asylum Application, a deconstructed asylum application created for exhibition. This site-specific work will consider my past experiences
and future fear of being persecuted in the United States on
account of "race, religion, nationality, or political opinion; or
because of membership in a persecuted social category of
persons in America”—this is wording taken directly from the
UN Convention of Human Rights describing experiences that
would qualify an individual for refugee status.
The institutional, economic, psychological and physical harm
that black and Native people have experienced in this country
(and in many other places) does not require another word of
proof. I need not waste a moment trying to prove certain aspects of my everyday life and the lives of my ancestors. What
I can do is explore the representation of those realities on my
own terms in an attempt to co-opt the power of formal documents—to respond to them in such a way that seeks to exceed
them in an attempt to interrupt rote narratives of acceptance
or denial that these forms are often used to determine. I want
to see if textile interventions on form documents can allow for
that paper to do something beyond the binary of “approve or
deny” thus imagining unanticipated outcomes.
During the residency, I will answer German asylum document
questions using multiple forms of text production that include
textile making processes with the knowledge that textile is a
form of text. As such, completed asylum documents will produce written texts and textile interventions that include woven
and beaded pages, folded and quilted documents. The latter
are strategies that Black and Native people have used to tell
stories for a long time, and I want to see how these textile interventions function when interwoven with international laws
and policies.
Asylum Application will contend with the legibility of harm to a
queer Black and Native body, questions about the nature of
safety and the methods by which harm can be represented
without being forced to rely on alphanumeric performance as
the sole avenue by which a claim for help can be made.
Are there any other new or emerging works you are
excited to share? Future collaborations?
Look for threadless weavings. What continues to emerge in
my work is the understanding of weaving as a methodology—a strategy for creating relationships between seemingly
disparate lines of thought or orientations to space. A praxis
texere need not be confined to the loom or the desire for new
objects. It is about the decisions an artist can make when
she knows how to work under tension—at times writing for
texture, or crossing gestures together at an angle as a form
of speech. I welcome collaborations that, as you say, test the
tensile strength of existing documents and posit multiple pathways by which official documentation—medical, academic,
legal, or financial—can occur. Our trauma, desire, and doubt
as human beings frequently exceed what we can express alphanumerically; we often rely on poetics to fill the gap. In short,
look for attempts at (im)material poetics.
I welcome transnational collaborations and collaborations
with those working in new media—the Jacquard loom is, after all, the ancestor to the computer as we know it today. I’ll be
working on a project soon to celebrate the 20th anniversary of
Watermelon Woman directed by Cheryl Dunye. What I can say
about it now is that I plan to explore relationships between simulations, avatars, and queerness within the frame of the film.
Beyond this, I have two manuscripts that are in need of some
re-imagining at a future residency. Oh, and if the Black Salt Collective asked me out on a creative collab, I’d say yes.
Documenting Disability, 2013. Three channel installation. 2 minutes 28 seconds. Courtesy of the artist.
Page 8 [AQ Issue 5]
Page 9 [AQ Issue 5]
Hera
Büyüktaşçıyan
Arie Amaya-Akkermans
If there is one constant in the fabric of Istanbul, it’s interruption.
In this irregular, gigantic mass of over 2000 square kilometers, buildings not only appear and disappear, but with them
entire populations, histories, and memories can shift, recede
and vanish permanently. On the corner of the intersection between Halaskargazi and Ergenekon streets stands a hotel built
in the 1990s on the site of the old Pangaltı hammam of which
there are no traces or references. The hammam, or Turkish
bath house, whose foundation date or history is unclear, was
demolished with the promise that it would be eventually restored . . . and then it simply disappeared. The only evidence
of it is a small black and white photograph from the 1970s on
the Internet where it is possible to see the hammam’s vaulted
dome. This simple story exemplifies a trend. In the course of
Turkey’s wars of independence and the transition from the decline of the Ottoman Empire to the birth of the Turkish republic,
not only did the names of the streets change in the historical
neighborhood of Pangaltı, but with them everything else eventually faded from view.
When artist Hera Büyüktaşçıyan, a native of Pangaltı, set
eyes on the site of the hammam in 2013 to attempt to visualize what has been completely erased, it wasn’t just that there
were no instructions or legal documents to help make sense
of what the building might have looked like or contained, but
there was also no site to excavate. Is it possible to reconstruct
something out of nothing? At PiST/// Interdisciplinary Project
Space, down the street from the physical site of the hammam,
Büyüktaşçıyan recreated the bath house in a peculiar way. It
wasn’t an architectural site as much as it was a mental space,
and therefore, a function of the imagination coextensive with
the uncertainties of deep memory. Without measures or dimensions, the final result was a space of intimacy that, through
movements and smells, restaged the hammam as a social
space, and therefore, as a site that has to be navigated by the
body. In this project of speculative archaeology, aptly titled In
Situ (2013), the artist proposed the tentative question: How
can one reconstruct something in such a way that putting it
into position becomes a way to invent, to create, to start, to
found?
What is the difference between finding and founding? Or, how
is something found if it was never founded? In Situ, Büyüktaşçıyan’s deceptively simple installation, consisting entirely
of soap, became a treasure map for something not locatable
except through empathy and sensorial experience, while at
the same time, infinitely divisible and movable. Digging out the
absent history of Armenians and Greeks in Istanbul, Büyüktaşçıyan is not presenting a finished archaeological site where
all the elements have been found, excavated, interpreted, and
placed in the specificity of a temporal framework, but rather,
she is addressing the methodological impossibility of continuity in history by the absence of references. At the narrative
limit of the artifact—the minimal unit of concrete meaning in
archaeology—the task is not to found the wholeness of a site
without putting an emphasis on the singularity of the object,
but instead is to focus on the most general qualities of spatiality and recognize the human function of spaces: a network
of both active and passive symbols that, in their totality, overcome the whatness of the earthly object. These symbols
found reality as a field of inter-subjective recognition.
Little did Büyüktaşçıyan know that during the course of her
exhibition, in the late spring of 2013, a sudden turn of events
in Istanbul would lead her—and the entire city—to reconsider
the physical and social fabric of the city due to another cycle
of interruptions that would draw new internal borders inside
the already convoluted topography of the city. Protests in the
nearby Gezi Park, a 15-minute walk from Pangaltı, escalated
into a nation-wide movement and became the first serious
crisis of authority in post-dictatorship Turkey. When these protests met with a violent response, a thought process similar to
that of In Situ became a political reality: makeshift barricades
against police violence were erected throughout the country
with the raw materials of the urban fabric itself, unleashing new
historical disjunctives, that, to this day, remain open-ended
and have transformed the country’s political arena into a viscous territory of uncertainty. How do repressed streams of
thought foam up to the surface and produce a misrecognition
between history and subject?
Resistance to a master narrative is an act of political foundation
in the form of a pendulum: the void left by a crisis of authority
can trail-blaze in any direction, and is often fraught with manifold risks subject to the contingencies of new political cosmologies with different simultaneous starting points and destinations. This primeval void, abysmal and unbound, resembles the
surging deep water of the Biblical narrative of creation; it is a
world pregnant with possibility but as yet suspended, dangerous, precarious and unpredictable. Hera Büyüktaşçıyan, the
dedicated surveyor of Istanbul’s unreadable palimpsest, is no
stranger to metaphors of water: they have dampened the pillars of her work since the very beginning. For Büyüktaşçıyan,
discovering streams of water, real and imagined, subterranean
and surface, carrying histories and the abeyance thereof, has
been a platform for researching transmission, mediation and
movement, but also destruction, disappearance and loss. As
the two parts of Istanbul lie in different continents separated by
enormous bodies of water, Büyüktaşçıyan’s practice is beset
by the necessity to translate the anxiety of sea-faring to the
drier land of memory.
She is now a resident of Heybeliada, one of the Istanbul’s
Prince Islands, some 30 km from the mainland. Orthodox
Christianity survived here for hundreds of years after the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople, and in modern times Heybeliada is also a site of displacement and population exchange.
Büyüktaşçıyan travels back and forth between territories that
are historical, cultural, mythical, and theological. Her 2014 exhibition The Land Across the Blind merges the journey of Byzas
of Megara—a mythological character credited with the foundation of Byzantium (modern-day Istanbul) in 667 BC when
he sailed across the Aegean Sea—with the history of the islands as places of exile where political dissidents were blinded
with iron rods and thrown into monasteries for the rest of their
lives, and the contemporary anxieties of a city in the eye of the
storm. Istanbul sits on a tectonic fault line that has destroyed
the city several times in its history, and it is also now the site of a
bitter internal conflict between modernization, restoration, and
more recently, the intermediate station in a dangerous journey
of migration that has seen millions displaced from the ongoing
and interminable war in Syria.
Page 10 [AQ Issue 5]
Büyüktaşçıyan’s Dock (2014), set on an old found wooden
table doubling as a base, resembles the small docks on the
islands, from which travelers make the daily journey between
the Prince Islands and the mainland, but it is a dock on which it
is not possible to stand. The eerily moving planks reproduce a
condition of instability: the journey of Byzas through the Aegean, the impossibility of finding safety on the land today, the perilous journeys of migrants through the ages, life in a collapsing
polity during moments of transition, or the constant sense of
interruption between the logic of self and story in the shifting
emotional landscapes of Istanbul, never at rest. As the work
was being shown in 2015 at one of the city’s iconic institutions,
Turkish nationalists marched in the direction of a ceremony
commemorating the centennial of the Armenian genocide. It
was a bitter reminder of the many violent chapters of Turkish
history that have been repressed and erased, not only from
buildings and national monuments, but also from the memory
and imagination of the present day. Büyüktaşçıyan’s reference
to contact with the water is a way to leave these gaps open,
and to make them visible.
Aquatic memory, as Turkish curator Başak Şenova phrased
it, is a pivotal mechanism in Büyüktaşçıyan’s work to let cultural artifacts and specific moments in time not only appear,
but also occupy a surface. This surface, however, is not yet an
absolute space; its contours are not defined and its mass and
volume are not subject to the shape of the container. In this
manner, the residual materials of history become invasive and
consolidate without solidifying. There are always questions.
There are always doubts. There are always new possibilities
for memory to appear in unexpected places, to pour over empty rooms and penetrate the walls in between chambers, to turn
narratives from fact to a porous truth that spills on itself. Solid
structures become dissolved through minor gestures, in particular drawing, affecting their gravity and stability and become
floating monads in a conceptual ecosystem where there is no
possible closure, not even in symmetrical forms. Finitude and
infinity are presented, not as a dichotomy, but as parallel systems of meaning. Familiar objects—photographs, buildings,
bridges, balconies—implode and become complex synthetic
propositions.
In 2014, when Büyüktaşçıyan traveled to Jerusalem to participate in the Jerusalem Show VII, curated by Şenova, she discovered the Patriarch’s Pool, also known as Hezekiah’s Pool, in
the middle of the Old City—one of the most politically contested territories in the world—an abandoned area which used to
hold the city’s water supply, part of a complex system of water sewages, cisterns and tunnels dating back to the classical
world. In the course of Büyüktaşçıyan’s research, she came
across the 19th century book The Recovery of Jerusalem written by British archaeologists Sir Charles William Wilson and Sir
Charles Warren, with extensive source material on the aqueducts of Jerusalem. From there the large installation The Recovery of an Early Water (2014) was born, questioning the way
in which water can carry and reveal, but also obscure. From a
political point of view, the artist’s access to the site which has
been barred to the local population by the Israeli authorities,
reinserted a void, a space which is neither public nor private,
into the public domain. From its abeyance, the site of the Patriarch’s Pool resurfaced temporarily from the maneuvers of the
Israeli occupation.
How does one reactivate a dormant space? Büyüktaşçıyan
performed a similar task during the 14th Istanbul Biennial in
2015, when she took over the reading room at the Galata
Greek Primary School, one of the schools of Istanbul’s Greek
community, now no longer in operation. Here she displayed an
archive of books and memorabilia from the original students of
the school before the Greek exodus, alongside her piece From
the Island of the Day Before (2015) that consisted of 668 covered notebooks, the exact number of original students, and a
number of drawings of islands, both real and imagined. But the
true effect came with the reading series Islands Speaking that
extended throughout the biennial and brought a number of
speakers to discuss “islandness” as a metaphor—for the self,
for colonialism, for political violence, for poetry, for translation.
An aural aspect to the extended gesture was introduced: the
acoustic articulation of the Greek language inside the room,
bringing back to life traces of something which had been
thought extinguished from Istanbul, enabled the concreteness
of live speech to penetrate not only psychic but also physical
space.
Back at the Patriarch’s Pool in Jerusalem, Büyüktaşçıyan was
faced with the challenge of how to bring the water back to the
pool. During the journey to Jerusalem, she looked into fabrics
used in construction sites throughout the city and the type
of semi-transparent materials that hung from above crates,
which she later incorporated into the installation as a kind of
double entendre: we are either sheltered by the tent of the
sky or swallowed by the abyss of water, of time, or of oblivion.
Are the waters above or below? The artist’s research seems
to suggest an ambiguous answer. When we operate in territo-
ries so fragmented, it’s difficult to discern what history is and
whether it isn’t a rather reactionary gesture to insist on memory as such omnipresence. Nevertheless, historical reconstruction flows within a horizon of the future, grounding the present
through symbols of continuity, linking up change and upheaval
of the here and now, not as interruptions or mutations, but as
the completion of earlier cycles that have been abetted. Since
that point onwards, imagining bodies of water, suspended and
in motion, has become codified in Büyüktaşçıyan’s work as a
mechanism to both interpret and challenge discontinuities.
In her second artist book, Ayp, Pen, Kim (a reference to the first
three letters of the Armenian alphabet), published for the occasion of her participation in the Armenian pavilion at the 2015
Venice Biennale, Büyüktaşçıyan draws, in borrowed images
and words, a vivid picture of her relationship to the Armenian
language as a Greek-Armenian living in Istanbul, a territory
which is considered by both communities somehow void, or
whose place in the hierarchy of meaning has been eroded.
In the book she recounts her arrival as a child to the Pangaltı
Mkhitaryan School, founded by the Mekhitarist monastic order (a congregation of Benedictine monks of the Armenian
Catholic Church) in 1825 and through turbulence and extinction, serving the Armenians of Istanbul. The relationship between Hera Büyüktaşçıyan and the 18th century monk Mkhitar of Sebaste, would not be limited to her school years. While
conducting research in Venice, and walking around vaporetto
stations, she came across the notice for San Lazzaro Island,
where the Mekhitarist order was founded, and she began a
new journey between Istanbul and San Lazzaro.
The island, a crucial point in the transmission of the Armenian
language, became a reference in Büyüktaşçıyan’s archipelago
of unfinished structures. Being a “mnatsort,”—the remnant of
something that has been lost or that has disappeared—as a
monk in San Lazzaro pointed out to her, is a direct reference
to the Armenian genocide, and calls on her to occupy different
temporal frameworks simultaneously.
Büyüktaşçıyan often recalls correcting people when they interrogate her on her life as an Armenian in the “diaspora” or
“exile.” She insists that being an Armenian in Istanbul is not
the diaspora, but is the very center of Armenian life. Her works
from Venice, shown at a library San Lazzaro where Lord Byron had once learnt the Armenian language, Letters from Lost
Paradise (2015) and The Keepers (2015), are informed by the
poet’s work and life, and his role in the liberation of Greece. As
a transnational community, it would be difficult to conceive of
this multilayered reflection on Armenian life as an ode to nationalism, yet Büyüktaşçıyan is certainly informed by the politics of Romanticism.
So many different types of islands: Heybeliada and the Prince
Islands in Istanbul, and inside Istanbul the mysterious island of
the Mkhitaryan in the center of a triangle between the neighborhoods of Osmanbey, Pangaltı and Nişantaşı. Then there
is the island of San Lazzaro in Venice with its centuries-long
Armenian print and library, or islands inside islands: The monastery of Halki, at the top of Heybeliada, with its theological
school closed by the Turkish government in 1971. Then there
are the less obvious islands: microcosms of urban violence
and gentrification, the unstoppable waves of migration that do
not reach their destination island, or the disappearance of minority languages and publications in Istanbul under the weight
of Turkification. “There is no world, there are only islands”,
writes Jacques Derrida, making reference to the difficulties of
intersubjectivity and human communication, so that we have
lost the world as a common space in which we hear one another. However specters remain, we still vaguely recognize the
shadows of the “other” trying to address us from an audible
faraway.
This aspect of inhabiting the world spectrally is present in the
characters, mythological and otherwise, who inhabit Hera
Büyüktaşçıyan’s realms of thought and imagination. They are
perhaps lost on the Cartesian plane of tangible geography,
but they simultaneously occupy other places. Speaking from
island to island, digging out what is buried deep below the
streams of visible water, they return to the world not as a site
of redemption but of endless foundation. Their suspension
then becomes the active site of a master narrative that writes
out the world from underneath and surfaces up only fragmentarily through leakage and contradiction. In her most recent
intervention—When things find their own cleft (2016), at the Alt
space in the restored Bomonti beer factory in Istanbul, in close
geographical proximity to the psychic space of the Pangaltı
hamam—Büyüktaşçıyan creates a tear through a newly built
wall, out of which a stream of red bricks flows from the past and
interrupts the seamless flow of the exhibition space, revealing
hidden histories of erasure and displacement, trapped in between the mute walls of the new city. This discreet leak, quietly
pouring over the new structure, becomes an ineffable territory
of resistance, always fluid, always in movement, always pointing elsewhere.
Up From Contemporaneity; Or, Why
Do Curators Talk
Like That? (Part 3)
John Rapko
The philosopher Hegel famously remarked that the owl of
Minerva flies at dusk. Minerva is among other things the goddess of wisdom, and Hegel’s dictum asserts that knowledge,
self-understanding, and wisdom are always retrospective, and
that we can gain understanding of ourselves in a comprehensive and stable manner only with regard to our pasts and what
we have already lived through. It is only when a period is drawing to a close that one might be in a position to grasp the shape
of a period: What processes and forces shaped the period?
Who were its decisive figures? What assumptions, beliefs,
and worldviews did its bitterest adversaries share? Whose
work will be seen as setting the terms for seriousness, and
which seemingly central figures will vanish without a trace?
But correlatively, on Hegel’s account, we are blocked from understanding ourselves in our contemporary environment. The
problem then, as Kierkegaard remarked, is that we understand
our lives backwards, but must live them forwards, without a secure and comprehensive understanding of the situations and
problems out of concern for which we act.
In the mid-1980s, the leading intellectual question was the
nature of the very period we were in. The easy questions
were: Are we in a new artistic era? (Yes.) Is it rightly called “the
postmodern”? (Yes, again.) Are there different kinds of postmodernisms . . . Are there different ways of self-clairvoyantly
inhabiting this period, and are these ways of different value?
(Yes.) et cetera. The problem arose in trying to characterize
the different ways of being postmodern, and in offering reasons for preferring one way to another. Generally, the many
and the wise considered the preferable kind of postmodernism to be “critical,” and the less preferable to be “conformist.”
Jean-François Lyotard, Fredric Jameson, and other intellectuals offered different versions of this distinction. In the 1990s
the questions concerning postmodernism faded without any
consensus on their answers in place. The urgency of the questions had appeared to be a product of the Cold War. The need
for a practical conception of non-conformist postmodernism
had come to seem a recent version of a long-term ideological
project: to provide some tangible evidence that the capitalist
liberal democracies of the West fostered a kind of artistic freedom, and with it a broad menu of free lifestyles that were suppressed and unavailable in the communist, authoritarian East.
So there had to be something artistically viable and vibrant and
expressive of individual freedom after the end of modernism.
In our current century, the place of the question of postmodernism has been re-occupied by something now called “contemporary art.” Attempts to characterize the distinctive features of contemporary art are beset by the same questions,
the same sort of alternative conceptions, and the same sense
of interminable debates that beset the earlier attempts to characterize postmodernism. There’s no consensus on when contemporary art began, but we do imagine we know a thing or
two about it. Like the ideological phantasm of postmodernism,
it comes after modernism, but unlike modernism or postmodernism, it is “global.” That is, it’s a kind of art that no longer finds
its home only in the major Euro-American or North Atlantic
cities, but also in the smaller cities and towns of every continent. Contemporary art inherits the most securely established
characteristics of postmodern art: its eclectic and hybrid quality, its easy acceptance of new technologies as artistic media,
and indeed its refusal to exclude any perceptible material as a
possible vehicle of art.
In previous issues of AQ I attempted an entrée into this new art
through one narrow passage: the public speech and writing
of its most visible representatives, that small number of curators who roam the earth deciding upon themes and choosing
exemplary artists for the world’s biennials.1 Analyzing their
opaque manner of speech and mountebank-like presentation,
I argued that these characteristics were symptomatic of various cognitive blind spots and deficiencies. In the first column,
I argued that this notorious opacity is an inheritance of a good
deal of art world obscurantism in the twentieth century, and
that the distinctive quality of the curators’ discourse was the
result, in part, of two factors: first, the curator must meet many,
not obviously reconcilable, demands from various constituencies, including museum professionals, critics, academic historians of recent art, local money-bags financing the shows, and
of course the millions simply thirsting for the latest in the arts.
The curator is like a member of the intelligentsia of the tourist
industry, who has to wear the mask of P. T. Barnum pretending
to be an intellectual. A second factor is negative: the curators’
discourse does not take place in the presence of the works
themselves, and is not well placed to initiate a process of collective self-education and self—clarification about the works
that are shown. In the second piece, I noted that the curators
work with no articulate conception of artistic process, and
seem to share unreflectively in the easy relativism of contemporary intellectual life, in particular in its manifestation in the art
world as a practical conception of a work of art as whatever
any individual artist declares to be such. With this conception,
the questions of what makes someone an artist (is it more than
declaring oneself one?), and more importantly, why anyone
else should accept this stipulation of the honorific term “art” to
anything whatsoever, never arise. 2
There are signs that the owl of Minerva may be stirring with regard to the curator and these ideologies. Terry Smith, the art
historian who has written most extensively in English, attempting overviews of recent art that highlight the role of the curator,
has recently lamented that curators are no longer leading the
way. In 2011, an ominously named organization called Independent Curators International hosted a conference in New
York, with the equally ominous title “The Now Museum.” Leading curators and historians of contemporary art gathered for
a discussion called “Contemporanizing History/Historicizing
the Contemporary.” (Discerning readers will recognize that I
am not making these titles up in a feeble attempt at mockery.
Nor, alas, is it likely that they were produced by some academic-jargon-generating computer program.) The proceedings
induced Smith to write a short book in 2012, titled Thinking
Contemporary Curating.3 In it Smith claims that we have recently entered a new and unhealthy phase of contemporary
art wherein “[c]urators are fading as agenda setters.”4 Smith
attempts therein to answer the question “What is contemporary curatorial thought?”5 The italicization of the term “contemporary” is meant to prepare the reader for the claim that the
distinctive feature of contemporary curatorial thought is that
Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Blind Leading the Blind, 1568. Tempera and oil paint, 33 x 61 inches. Courtesy of the Internet.
it addresses and orients itself to the exhibition of something
called “contemporaneity.” The book purports to explicate this
term, to distinguish the valuable kind of contemporaneity from
its debased kinds, and to survey a range of exhibitions that
successfully took up the challenge of exemplifying the valuable kind. This book has been followed recently by the publication of a volume of Smith’s interviews with 10 curators and
thinkers, Talking Contemporary Curating, wherein a number of
the interviewees address the question of contemporaneity.6
If the owl is roosting after a short flight, perhaps it is on these
books. So, what is this contemporaneity that has allegedly
shown itself to be the obscure target of a curatorial thought,
and so accordingly a central concern of contemporary art?
Smith knows what contemporaneity is not: it is not rightly understood as a quality exhibited generally by contemporary
art, particularly not a concern to be up to date. The concern to
be of our moment is a concern for “the contemporary,” whose
only virtue seems to be that it is easier to pronounce than contemporaneity. Smith does not so much reason about problems
with the contemporary, but rather just seems to inhale and exhale a fashionable academic atmosphere. He writes that “to
me, this phrase [the contemporary] conjures a (nervously)
conformist—or, at best, a (coolly) complicit—contemporaneity, a mood familiar to the fashion industry . . . It is true that, at
the margins, this is a mood scarcely distinguishable from genuinely contemporary différance, yet the difference increases
as one slopes away from the other until it becomes huge, then
total.”7 Presumably with the use of the italicized différance,
Smith is invoking the once-fashionable thought of Jacques
Derrida, wherein the term indicated a quasi-conceptual operation of “differing and deferring” that was allegedly at work
within any process of signification, or indeed any ascription of
identity to anything whatsoever. To me, however, noting this
does not lessen, but rather intensifies the sense that I am reading gibberish. Smith nowhere offers any analysis of conformism or complicity, nor suggests any reason for thinking that
they are in every case detrimental to the practice of the arts.
At other points, Smith indicates that, in practice, a concern
for the contemporary is a kind of classifying operation, again
without arguing that this is necessarily problematic, instead
of simply being an aspect of everyone’s muddling along in life.
More pointedly, he suggests that in practice the contemporary
is bound to a diffuse ideology of “presentism,” wherewith phenomena are presented in abstraction from their pasts, and with
an impoverished sense of their possible futures. Finally, his use
of the term the contemporary somehow secretes the sense
that the abstracted phenomena presented under this term are
definitive of what is and what might be.
The authentic sense of “contemporaneity” emerges by contrast with its debased sense in “the contemporary.” Rightly
understood, contemporaneity involves the understanding
and presentation of recent phenomena as saturated “with
many different kinds of pasts, both as memories and expectations.”8 Smith repeats this characterization a few times, but
offers nothing else by way of theoretical explication. A problem that immediately arises for this characterization of the
concept of contemporaneity is that it makes no reference to
anything contemporary. Smith seems to acknowledge this,
but does not seem to view it as problematic, as he goes on
to suggest that an exhibition of even the earliest works of art,
such as the 80,000-year-old engraved pebble found in South
Africa’s Blombos Cave could exhibit contemporaneity, if the
pebble were exhibited in such a way as to induce a viewer’s
awareness of its pasts and the choices made in its production.
But then the sense of contemporaneity simply collapses into
something like “artistic process.” If, in the end, all that Smith is
claiming is that a good exhibition shows the process whereby the exhibited artifacts were created, then it’s hard to see
what all, or indeed any, of the fuss is about. Smith leaves unaddressed the question of why such a concern is the distinctive
task of contemporary curators.
The only other route that Smith suggests to determine the
nature of contemporaneity is through the characterization of
it as the object of curatorial thought. So what are the right sort
of contemporary curators addressing? Smith writes that “curating is the exercise of curatorial thought within the practical
exigencies of making an exhibition.”9 But since Smith characterizes curatorial thought as the exhibition of contemporaneity,
his thought is moving in the smallest of circles: contemporaneity is the object of curatorial thought; the curators’ exhibitions
display contemporaneity; if someone curates, she is guided by
the concern to address contemporaneity. The owl of Minerva
has not budged.
Should one look to the curators themselves then for some explication of what is meant by contemporaneity? Smith does
claim that it can be exemplified in different ways, and explicitly cites three exemplary ways from exhibitions around the
year 2000: Kirk Varnedoe’s attempts to link the present with
the modernist past, Okwui Enwezor’s attempts to display the
post-colonial condition, and Nicolas Bourriaud’s attempts to
display the genre of contemporary art he influentially termed
relational art. In the book of interviews, Smith repeatedly brings
up the issue of how the particular curator’s work exhibits contemporaneity. In one response, Enwezor declares: “I’m saying
that the post-colonial constellation may be understood as one
layer of contemporaneity. I think it’s hard to define temporal or
even spatial boundaries. I believe there is a close relationship
between modernity, post-coloniality, and contemporaneity.
And this alone can enable us to come to the point where we
can have a radical sense of contemporaneity, of real being in
the world.”10 Aside from the use of the word “this” in the last
sentence, I cannot see any reason that these sentences are
presented in this particular order: they convey as little or as
much read in any sequence. Consider, then, the last sentence:
a basic problem is the unclarity of the reference of the “this.”
Most likely it is intended to refer to “a close relationship,” but although Enwezor has previously sketched some conception of
modernity and post-coloniality, the meaning of contemporaneity is again left wholly unclarified, and so too its relationship
to modernity and post-coloniality. The phrase “real being in the
world” is used as an explicative apposition to “radical sense of
contemporaneity,” but evidently this is an attempt to explain
the obscure with the even more obscure.
Likewise, in another interview, the hyper-active Hans-Ulrich
Obrist is asked: “is the connecting of culture the way you understand the idea of contemporaneity? If so, how do you actually curate contemporaneity—I mean you, personally?”11
Smith’s way of phrasing the question pretends that there is
some shared understanding of contemporaneity, and allows
Obrist to proceed by describing his legendarily frenzied pace
of curating and interviewing artists, without addressing the
theoretical point. In his curating, Obrist sees himself as simply
taking up ideas suggested by artists—in particular their unrealized projects—and facilitating their completion and exhibition. The stylistic effect of this conception is that in Obrist’s
speech and writing the distinction between thinking and
name-dropping is abolished: “I grew up in the studio of artists
[sic] Peter Fischli and David Weiss;”“Among them were the
curators Marie-Claude Beaud and Jean de Loisy, who subsequently invited me . . .”; “In 2012, on a visit to LA, I had breakfast
with the critic Kevin McGarry and the artist Ryan Trecartin . . .”
et cetera.12 At the end of the interviews, Smith shares his own
unrealized project of a creating a worldwide network that will
include “a nomadic cohort of graduate students, young artists,
curators, and activists” who will roam the earth “work[ing] on
projects that explore connectivity, which I see as the biggest
challenge to understanding our contemporaneity.”13 On the evidence of Smith’s writing there are a few other big challenges
to understanding it.
Out of this brief consideration of these quite recent writings
and interviews from the leading, internally prominent curators
and the academics who are most intensively occupied with
understanding their activities, one tentative conclusion suggests itself: the phantom term contemporaneity inherits the
same charisma and persistent obscurity that the conceptual
phantasm of a “critical postmodernism” had in the 1980s. Contemporaneity is a pseudo-concept generated by the cultural
pressure upon curators, and members of the art world generally, to claim a specially privileged status by virtue to their
intimate access to what’s happening right now, and the sense
of what’s going to happen tomorrow emerging today. So another reason curators “talk like that” is their need to present
themselves as the guardians of something that’s enormously
valuable to experience, but which is too elusive for the public
to access independently of the curators. Alas, not only is the
owl of Minerva not flying but the talk of contemporaneity has
not even awakened it.
1) John Rapko, ‘The Design Isn’t Firm; Or, Why Do Curators Talk Like
That?”, SFAQ 20
2) The Anti-Genius, Or, Why Do Curators Talk Like That? (Part Two)”,
SFAQ 21
3) Terry Smith, Thinking Contemporary Curating. 2012. New York:
Independent Curators International
4) p.144
5) p.17, italics in original
6) Terry Smith, Thinking Contemporary Curating. 2015. New York:
Independent Curators International
7) p.143
8) p.144
9) p.136
10) p.91
11) p.115
12) p.115, p.119, p.122
13) pp.137-8
On Point 2.10:
Remembering
James Albertson
Move Your Archives
John Held, Jr.
Mark Van Proyen
The past year brought many sad passings to the northern California art scene, but one that has received scant remark was
that of James Albertson, whose battle with cardiovascular disease ended last July in Sacramento. He was 73 years old. Like
many artists of his generation, he exhibited regularly to favorable reviews, and he received two NEA fellowships back in the
years when such things were given to individual artists—25
years ago. It’s fair to say that he had a following, but much of
it was on the East Coast, where collectors are more adventurous and risk is less frowned upon. In an all-too-familiar story for
Bay Area artists, we can say that he was respected by other
artists, but shunned by the wine-and-cheese clans that make
up the Northern California patronage class and much of the
local curatorial class as well. There were a few exceptions:
John Fitzgibbon and Susan Landauer did do their part to place
Albertson’s work in the public eye, in group exhibitions at the
Crocker Art Museum (2003) and The San Jose Museum of Art
(2000) respectively. He also exhibited several times at the Joseph Chowning Gallery, which operated in an out-of-the way
location on 17th Street until it closed in 2007. Chowning being
the eccentric San Francisco dealer who, as Fitzgibbon once
said, “couldn’t sell keys in a jail.”1
On the East Coast, Albertson had the support of the late Marcia Tucker, who included Albertson’s work in her infamous
“Bad” Painting exhibition at the New Museum in early 1978. At
that post-minimalist and post-conceptualist moment, “Bad”
Painting was a truly transgressive exhibition held at a time
when real artistic transgression was possible—not yet the
well-worn and possibly worn-out career option routinely still
taught in graduate schools. In fact, we can now judge “Bad”
Painting as a very worthy forerunner of Paul Schimmel’s Helter
Skelter exhibition held at MOCA in 1992, itself anticipating the
Pop Surrealism exhibition that was held at the Aldrich Museum
of Contemporary Art in Ridgefield, Connecticut in 1998. Soon
after that, clone fatigue began to set in and then proliferate,
leading to an avalanche of copycat exhibitions sporting indicative names like Beautiful Losers, Bad is What I Do Good, and
The Whitney Biennial.
And insofar as the artists included in the “Bad” Painting exhibition was concerned, Albertson was the baddest of the bad,
especially if the term could be understood in its more contemporary sense of being “badass,” “vulgar,” or “unapologetically
naughty.” Viewed from another perspective, we could also
say that his paintings were actually stunningly good in terms
of technique and execution, but only “bad” in relation to his
lascivious subject matter that, at the time, must have looked
exceedingly and willfully tasteless. But times were already
changing, and Albertson and his ilk were early bellwethers
of those changes. The art world of the late 1970s had grown
blatherously placid after the fevers of the 1960s and early
1970s, partly owing to the fact that funding for the National
Endowment for the Arts and other government arts agencies
were at their zenith by virtue of longstanding bi-partisan Congressional support.
Meanwhile, New York itself was a disaster area of crumbling
infrastructure and social unrest, meaning that “the arts” were
being circumstantially recast as visions of entitled social denial. The tide of political reaction that propelled Ronald Reagan
into the White House was only beginning to form in California, and was heralded by the launch of the campaign to pass
Proposition 13, in what turned out to be a landslide election
James Albertson, Sex, Violence, Religion + the Good Life, 1976. Oil on canvas, 39 x 48 inches. Courtesy of the Albertson/Stagg Collection.
eight months after the end of “Bad” Painting’s run. I bring this
up because those changes seem in many ways to foreshadow
those of our own time, both within and beyond the art world.
Whether it be the age of Reagan or the age of Trump, it looked
and still looks very much like the age of fear, and then, just as
now, the art world lived in a state of business-as-usual denial,
perched on a shaky precipice of manufactured relevance.
For several years prior to the opening of “Bad” Painting, “fresh”
was the term for the kind of art that suborned attention in the
age of polite post-minimalist orthodoxy. But by the end of 1977,
good ol’ fresh was well on its way to becoming the new stale,
discredited as a frivolous cherry set atop cultural pretenses
that had become an otiose creampuff of smug non-confrontational hypocrisy. A new spirit of cultural contest was in the
air, imported into the New York art world from that sweet land
of funk called San Francisco, and from the monster-roster of
imagist artists hailing from Chicago.2 It is worth noting that Albertson had first hand familiarity with both traditions, having
earned his BFA degree at the Chicago Art Institute in 1966 and
his MFA degree at what was then called the California College
of Arts and Crafts in 1968.
Oddly, Norman Mailer was among the first to grumble the kind
of misgivings about the value of elite cultural institutions that
would tee-up the onrushing shift in attitude that would knock
the upper-case C off of the word culture. In 1974, he published
a picture book called The Faith of Graffiti, which included stunning photographs of even more stunning street art anonymously executed in and around a New York City that seemed
to be going to hell in a John Lindsay/Abraham Beame/Ed
Koch handbasket. These images suggested that, at the street
level, a combative vitality was in the air, even if it was absent
from the galleries and other art spaces of the time. But soon
after “Bad” Painting paved the way, Jean-Michel Basquiat and
Keith Haring surfaced from the subterranean shadows, and
street art was the new gallery art, heralding the moment when
the anthropological notion of culture with a chaotic lower case
"c" started to look more interesting that the institutionally sanctified upper-case version. (We would do well to remember
that, at that time, no one in North America was paying much
attention to what was going on in Europe, where expressive figuration was already on the rise in Germany and Italy.)
Albertson’s artist statement from the “Bad” Painting catalog
spoke volumes about his position on and within the exhibition:
“I believe that the particular forms that art takes are the products of individual sensibilities in various times and places. I do
not believe that art progresses, only that it changes. Consequently, I do not concern myself with any ideas about what
I should be doing, but only with making something that will
excite me and give me pleasure . . . One way that I do this is
through purposeful ambiguity, [and] references to things that
people care about (sex, death, religion) . . . I try to make art that
colors existence instead of being an overly familiar and redundant backdrop to it.”3
A good example of Albertson’s work from this period is Sex,
Violence, Religion + the Good Life (1976), which was given
pride of place in the installation of “Bad” Painting. Executed in
a lustrous palate of garish oil colors, it shows a woman wearing a transparent negligee serving up large hunks of meat to a
crazed brood of multi-racial toddlers. There is a grotesque pigface affixed to the nearby refrigerator, while a crucifix adorns
the adjacent wall. As Albertson’s work evolved through the
1980s, he focused on doing wicked send-ups of art history.
These usually took the form of modestly scaled oil paintings
that revisited the conventions of mannerist and Baroque picture composition, but adding a calculated infantilism. I mean
this literally: he reversed the roles played by adult and child
figures, so that the tiny angels and putti that normally adorned
the compositions of painters such as Pontormo and Rubens
were given adult proportions, while the figures of saints and
madonnas were rendered as obstreperous infants. Albertson
was deeply knowledgeable about European art history and
the painters that figured in it, and that knowledge guided him
to exaggerate his own oil painting technique far into the realm
of libidinous play. Even though there was nothing pious about
his work, he was able to “self-consciously render the contradictions between surface and depth” to achieve a kind of
“madness of vision” based on creating “palimpsests of the unseeable,” to borrow three sentence fragments from Christine
Buci-Glucksmann’s 1986 book La Folie Du Voir. 3
We should also remember that Albertson was quite a collector. When I first came to know him during the early 1980s, I was
impressed by his stupendous collection of plastic ray guns of
vintage provenance. When he moved to the Sacramento area
in 2006, I lost touch with him but I did know that he was doing
some teaching at Sierra College and American River College,
as well as the California Department of Corrections. I have
been informed by his friend Irving Marcus that, in recent years,
he had amassed an impressive collection of African sculpture,
about which he had developed a scholarly passion. James
Albertson was an interesting guy and an interesting artist, and
I hope that someone will organize the memorial exhibition
that his work continues to deserve. So far, I have heard nothing about any such plan, and it saddens me to think that this
column alone might have to suffice as a public celebration of
his notable career. Chalk this “sadness” up to one of the more
demoralizing aspects of the brave new art world of the past
decade, shaped by money and a giddy enthusiasm for erasing
history to make the fiction of nowness somehow more believable.
James Albertson, Big Boy in the Bedroom, 2001. Oil on canvas, 36 x 29 inches. Courtesy of the Albertson/Stagg Collection.
1) Quoted from Fitzgibbon’s eulogy for Eduardo Carillo, U.C. Santa Cruz,
September 28, 1997.
2) At that time, funk was the reigning style of art in Northern California,
owing to the prominence given to it by an exhibition of the same name
curated by Peter Selz at the University Art Museum in Berkeley in 1967.
The so-called “monster school” of Chicago artists pursued a kind of
grotesque figuration that drew upon Midwestern folk art traditions.
What united both groups was their strident antipathy to minimalism,
which they thought to be equally drenched in arrogant pretense and
soulessness.
3) See Marcia Tucker, “Bad” Painting (New York, New Museum, 1978).
2-3.
Collecting, Compiling & the Construction of Cultural
Histories
The act of collecting is an expression of one’s passion, be it butterflies or paintings by Monet. The curse of the assembler of
cultural heritage is: What do you do with the accumulation while
you are alive and what happens to the collection when you are
deceased? This condition is aggravated when the collector is
also an artist and able to develop a large collection with limited
capital. Storage and the patience of loved ones are ongoing limitations, but in the long run the crucial concern is the future ability
of the collection to generate scholarly research and exhibition,
gaining an afterlife through increased exposure and influence.
Without detailed digital documentation, knowledge of the collection is doomed to disregard. To rectify this situation, the dedicated collector is forced to turn compiler, guiding a future audience towards the new directions that they have uncovered and
where these directions may lead. Each new generation gains
from those previous, adding something new to a progressing
cultural history’s vocabulary. Without this guidebook, the more
challenging works of contemporary art escape and defy understanding. In a raw, unformed state, they fail to attract institutional
interest, subsequent scholarly research, and a renewed life after
the collector’s departure.
The plight of the veteran mail artist is especially acute. Mail pours
in from a Fluxus-inspired Eternal Network of artists producing
correspondence, periodicals, artists’ books, original art, artists’
postage stamps, and collage, all incorporating numerous artistic mediums including photocopy, photography, painting, digital,
audio, rubber stamp and other established and marginal mediums. Collaborative works are documented and distributed to
participating artists, the active contributor receiving exhibition
catalogs, “add and pass” works, assemblings (periodical-like
compilations of original artworks), magazines, project reports,
recordings of social, political and performative actions, as well
as “tourism” reports for when two or more networkers meet.
Having mailed away works with little expectation in return, the
choices for incoming mailings are endless. They can be recycled, framed, hoarded, sorted, cataloged, discarded, or ignored.
Upon one’s passing, and without previous instruction, the remains of the collection are left to the discretion of a loved one’s
bewildered whims. One of the aims of this column is to aid those
mystified—both artist and estate—by what action to take concerning the cultural materials in their care.
A well-developed history has been formulated within the field
despite widespread art historical neglect. Duchamp, Dada, Fluxus, Ray Johnson, and assorted twentieth century avant-garde
movements and figures, have cemented the foundation upon
which mail art has thrived. Its DIY nature includes all and rejects
none. In an analog state, postal interaction paved the way for the
Internet in preparation for a digitally creative, open, international
communication system.
Mail art’s greatest asset is the wide arc of its inclusion. Dismissed in the eyes of critics by its uneven quality, the totality
of the network is its greatest strength and provides an incisive
view into contemporary cultural concerns. There is no better or
worse mail artist, only less or more active participants. The most
instructive mail art collections are broad in scope, rather than,
as collections routinely are, discretionary in nature. The Eternal Network is an encompassing system, fostering interaction
across the divides of geography, language, and culture. The archive should reflect this welcomed diversity. Decentralized Worldwide
Every six years for 30 years, the international mail art community
has initiated a yearlong theme that examines a central concern
of the medium. The initial project was the 1986 Decentralized
Worldwide Mail Art Congress, which sought to stimulate practitioners into a discussion of the cultural relevance of mail art
practice and its ramifications on their lives. Conceptualized by
Swiss artists H. R. Fricker and Günther Ruch, the year brought
together over 500 artists from 25 countries in 70 documented
congress sessions.1
Six years later, the 1992 Decentralized Worldwide Networker
Congress (organized by Fricker and Peter Kaufman) was called
into being to encourage mail artists to dialogue with other networks (zine culture, artist books, print and music distribution,
Neoism, Church of the SubGenius, and nascent telecommunication communities). The year of Incongruous Meetings (1998),
Obscure Actions (2004), and Art Detox (2010), all organized by
Vittore Baroni of Viarregio, Italy, perpetuated mail art’s yearlong
inquiries.
When H. R. Fricker and Gunther Rüch first conceived of the
1986 Worldwide Decentralized Congress as a conventional and
centralized meeting to discuss mail art, it was quickly modified
to allow anyone, anywhere, to participate. It was felt that this
best reflected the decentralized spirit of the medium, allowing
open participation by anyone with an interest in the activity.
Social practice has been a fashionable avenue in art for quite
some time now, and mail artists were among the first to tread
this path on an international scale. Inspired by the Fluxus blend
of art and life and espousing similar attitudes as those exemplified by the actions of Joseph Beuys, mail artists have extended
their distanced relationships to meetings in which they interact
in creative ways. Mail art incorporated these ideas before the advent of the Internet, foreshadowing the widespread desire for timely, open,
international communication, mimicking e-mail and the social
media platforms yet to come. Like all advance scouts who venture into territories not yet trod by the populace, upon recounting their tales and making the unknown common knowledge,
their services are no longer required. The analog postal system
has been digitally superseded as the most popular timely, and
economical means of information transfer, but its obsolescence
has opened itself up to new possibilities.
In 2016, the mail art community focuses on the question of
archives. Move Your Archives 2016 is the latest yearlong international collaborative project conceptualized by Vittore
Baroni, joined by fellow Italian Claudio Romero in promotion and
documentation through digital newsletters disseminated via
social media, mailings, and participation at art events. Earlier in
the year there were postings of archival materials on social media sites and rumblings of convened meetings, but it is Baroni’s
wish that mail artists explore innovative, challenging ways in
which to extend the avant-garde spirit to the Archive Year, citing
Fulger Silvia’s attachment of thumbnail artworks to his substantial flowing beard. Michael Leigh, England. From the collection of John Held, Jr.
Chicago Fluxfest 2013. Button. From the collection of John Held, Jr.
Rubber stamp in memory of Steven Leiber. From the collection of John Held, Jr.
Ray Johnson (c. 1955) postcard by William S. Wilson.
From the collection of John Held, Jr.
Promotional postcards, "VILE" magazine, Anna Banana, Editor.
From the collection of John Held, Jr.
Rubber stamp by Robert Rocola, San Leandro, CA, (c. 1984). From the collection of John Held, Jr.
Baroni’s invitation to participants states:
In decades of exchanges, many cultural workers
have built up large collections of “physical” materials (original works, publications, complete projects,
etc.). These heritages of ideas are likely to remain
submerged and ignored, continuing to gather dust
on the shelves or to languish in boxes locked in garages and attics. Many collections were destroyed,
others were donated to institutions that are reluctant to put it to good use. In the thirtieth anniversary (1986-2016) of the Decentralized Congress, we
invite you to revisit and revive your archive, making it available to others and trying new forms of
encounter and collaboration with the most diverse
collections, in order to promote a year of archives
in motion.
Move your archive
Live your archive
Share your archive
Recycle your archive
WHAT: archives of mail art, visual poetry, copy art,
small press, independent music, etc. but also creative collections of all kinds and epochs (stamps,
bookplates, bottle caps, etc.).
WHEN: at any time during 2016, for any length of
time, whenever two or more creative archives meet.
WHERE: in the studios and archives of artists, poets,
musicians, writers, etc. In galleries, museums and
other spaces devoted to the arts, but also in atypical spaces (squares, streets, shops, parks, etc.).
WHY: to put back in circle a hidden wealth of “concrete” materials and experiences. To not content
ourselves with the great virtual emporium of culture
made accessible by the Internet. To not have to wait
another century before these materials are “historicized” by art critics and museums.
M.Y.A. 2016 is a global, open and independent non-profit
experiment, which promotes a different use of archival
materials through meetings, sharing, synergies and group
workshops. Document your contribution to M.Y.A. 2016 with
photos, reports and in any way you see fit, then post the
materials on the online diary in the Dododada website at http://
dododada.ning.com/group/mya2016 and you will be included
in the final catalog.
The Mail Art Congress years have always reflected the network’s concerns of the moment. In the mid-1980s, when they
were first established, mail art turned inward. Neglected by
the mainstream, the medium was bereft of critical examination from without, and succumbed to introspection. The present day finds the aging practitioner of the medium—those in
their 60s, 70s, and older—concerned with the disposition of
decades-old correspondence, publications, and artworks.
Continued institutional disregard forces the mail artist who is
apprehensive of their collection’s future, toward an attentive
comprehension of the situation and the formulation of creative
solutions.
The next column in this series explores the disposition of collections of contemporary art currently dismissed by art museums and libraries as too challenging for institutional inclusion
and some possible solutions toward rectifying the situation. 1) Ruch, Günther. “MA-Congress: Documentation,” Out-Press, Geneva, Switzerland, 1987. 159 pages. Page 13 [AQ Issue 5]
Millennial Collectors
Gary Yeh
Anna Hygelund
Gary Yeh is currently a junior at Duke University and a young collector of emerging art. He regularly travels to NYC to see shows,
visit artist’s studios, and attend fairs. I sat down with him during
Armory Week to learn his unique story of how he became a
Millennial collector.
Let’s start with some basic context. You were born
in Washington D.C. and aren’t from a collecting family, correct? You mentioned one of your first forays
in art was organizing a virtual gallery for your fellow
high school students to sell their art. What inspired
you to do that? That’s right—not from a collecting family. I founded the virtual gallery first and foremost as a way to engage more directly
with art. I had taken an art history course my junior year and
fell in love right away but I wanted to be more hands-on. It also
seemed like a lot of my peers were disinterested in art because
it had this notion of being elitist. The gallery’s mission was thus
to increase access to art for students.
Gary Yeh with Mary Weatherford's Casa Reef (2016) at Skarstedt Gallery,
New York.
Gary Yeh's Instagram profile (@ArtDrunk).
Now you are studying Economics and Art History at
Duke University . . . do I detect a budding dealer in
the works? I get that question a lot. After running the virtual gallery, I
dreamed of becoming an art dealer—what a rush it would be
to own a space or two, curate shows, and sell art for a living.
But it’s a tough business. The end goal, however, is to collect.
Some gallerists have phenomenal collections, but that seems
more the exception than the rule. Who knows, I also love Robert Mnuchin’s story of working in finance and then “retiring” as
a dealer.
When did you buy your first work? What was it?
What led you to it? How do you finally know to pull
the trigger?
I would say I had two “first” purchases. When I was 17, I bought a
small watercolor by Adam Lister—a local D.C. artist at the time.
I ended up buying five more watercolors but still didn’t consider myself a collector. My second “first” came when I made the
conscious decision and said, “I want to collect art.” That led to
my first painting by Peter Mohall. I first saw Peter’s work on Instagram and jumped on it. No real tangible reason—purely a
gut feeling. I think in general that speaks a lot to how I collect.
Even if you give me a month to decide between several works,
I’ll end up picking the piece that drew me in initially.
Does your collection have a particular theme or focus? I have always loved post-Internet art. Fortunately there are
many artists that can be considered a part of that movement—
my wish list certainly reflects that. What I realized, though, was
that I was limiting myself and missing out on a lot of other great
artists. Good quality work can always find the right context in
the scope of a larger collection. Overall, I focus on work that I
believe is a snapshot of today’s society or where it might go.
You mentioned that you’re on the board at the
Nasher Museum of Art at Duke. How did you get involved? What is your favorite piece in the collection?
I am serving my third year on the Nasher’s student advisory
board and have been able to sit on a couple Board of Advisors
meetings. While it has been fun getting a behind-the-scenes
look at how a museum is run, my greatest takeaway has been
meeting prominent members of the art world. Jason Rubell
and Paula Cooper sit on the board, for example. Blake Byrne
has also been particularly passionate and open in sharing his
collecting insights. My favorite piece at the Nasher is a work
on paper by Robert Motherwell. I used to work at the Nasher
and I would walk by the Motherwell nearly every day—it grew
on me.

How do you see your role as a young collector within
the larger art world?
I am still trying to figure out where I fit in the larger art world.
Long-term, I would love to look back and be recognized as a
young collector who had vision in picking the right artists.
View of the Mary D.B.T. Semans Great Hall at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University. Courtesy of Duke University
As the infamous ArtDrunk on Instagram you have
developed quite the following for such a young collector. How did that evolve? How do you use social
media as an art collector?
[Laughs] “Infamous” is too kind, but thank you. I actually started ArtDrunk strictly as a means to keep track of all the art that
I saw and liked. I still wake up every day surprised that so many
people follow me—they probably don’t even know I’m a student! Instagram has been useful for reaching out to artists for
studio visits; once an artist gets picked up by a gallery their
contact info is usually impossible to find. Nowadays, it seems
like every artist is on Instagram, so it is easier to reach out that
way, especially when they are generally responsive and open
to having me visit.
Where do you collect—a combination of fairs, galleries, and auction houses? I collect mainly through galleries and studios after I’ve made a
personal connection with the artist. As a collector, a painting
has much greater meaning when I can put a face and story to
it. I will definitely start looking at auction houses now as well,
since you mentioned some opportunities to pick up good work
at great prices.
What are some of your favorite galleries or fairs?
Zieher Smith & Horton is one of my favorites. While I have yet
to acquire anything through them, Andrea Zieher happens to
be a Duke alum and has been incredibly generous with her
time, showing me work and talking to me about the art world.
Hauser & Wirth is also up there—I just love their massive Chelsea space, which always has top-notch exhibitions. Their one
guard, Andrew, is also so knowledgeable and friendly. As for
art fairs, I really enjoyed last year’s edition of Frieze Masters.
The quality of art across the board was exceptional. A little
crazy that there was a small Bruegel painting that was in better
condition than any Bruegel I had ever seen in a museum. I also
saw Eddie Redmayne from afar—that was pretty cool.
You mentioned that visiting an artist’s studio is important to you. Why is that? What studio has been
most memorable to you so far? Studio visits are the greatest reason why I love collecting and
staying engaged in the contemporary art scene. They offer a
more intimate and relaxed pace, as opposed to the rush of art
fairs and gallery hopping. They are also a great way to learn
about emerging artists when there is minimal literature on
them. The most memorable studio visit was also my first. Back
in 2014, I had the opportunity to accompany a friend who was
visiting Ai Weiwei’s studio. My only interaction with Ai Weiwei
was when he asked if I wanted a stroopwafel, so maybe that
doesn’t really count as a studio visit but it was damn memorable.
We’ve experienced a lot of speculation in the emerging market. All that aside, which three artists have
you most excited right now?
Sofia Leiby, Brent Wadden, and Mary Weatherford.
Realistic or not, what’s the top work on your wish
list?
Tough question: that changes almost daily. Richter’s Betty
(1988) has consistently been one of my favorite works of art,
even though I have never seen it in person. Lately, I have been
thinking of Kon Trubkovich’s Sunrise friend (2016)—it’s on display at Boesky East right now. I am really into abstract painting,
but these two works have an aura that draws you right in.
Any advice for emerging collectors? Mistakes
you’ve made?
Buy with your heart and your eyes, not with your ears. While
there is tremendous value in educating yourself by talking
to advisors and gallerists, collecting decisions should come
down to your own gut. Even if a collector has “bad taste,” does
it really matter if they love what they are living with? The one
mistake I have made so far is going against that advice and
buying a painting because the dealer strongly pushed that it
was a hot artist. At the end of the day, every dealer believes
he or she has the best artists, so it is up to the collector to sift
through the noise.
What’s next for you after graduation?
The million dollar question. I am interested in investments, consulting, and tech startups—as you can see, it is a bit up in the
air right now. But if anyone out there wants to hire me, I am happy to send over my resume!
Peter Mohall, Untitled (Brushstrokes Painting), 2014. Courtesy of the artist.
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Twice Is Nice
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AVAILABLE NOW FROM CITY LIGHTS PUBLISHERS |
AVAILABLE NOW FROM CITY LIGHTS PUBLISHERS
THE GILDA STORIES
EXPANDED 25TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION
by Jewelle Gomez
Before Buffy, before Twilight, before Octavia Butler’s
Fledgling, there was The Gilda Stories, Jewelle Gomez’s
lush vampire novel.
“Jewelle Gomez sees right into the heart. In
Gilda’s stories she has created a timeless journey, taken us back into history and forward
into possibility. This is a book to give to those
you want most to find their own strength.”
—Dorothy Allison
“The Gilda Stories is groundbreaking not just
for the wild lives it portrays, but for how it
portrays them—communally, unapologetically,
roaming fiercely over space and time.”
—Emma Donoghue, author of Room
City Lights Publishers
Trade Paperback Original
ISBN 9780872866744 | eISBN 9780872866997
$16.95 | April 2016 | 288pp
Open Daily 10am–Midnight | City Lights Booksellers & Publishers, 261 Columbus Ave., San Francisco, CA 94133 | 415-362-8193 | www.citylights.com
Jessica Silverman Gallery - SFAQ Ad.pdf
Laura Owens shows new
work, & Andrea Fraser
is on our mind.*
WWW.WATTIS.ORG
4.28 – 7.23/2016
1
4/19/16
4:40 PM
C
M
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CM
MY
CY
CMY
K
CALIFORNIA COLLEGE OF THE ARTS
488 Ellis Street
San Francisco, CA 94102
+1 415 255 9508
[email protected]
jessicasilvermangallery.com
JOHN PREUS: NEW WORKS
MAY 13 - JUNE 25
OPENING RECEPTION MAY 13, 6-8PM
Oracle 4, 2016, reframed Chicago Public Schools blueprint, 31 x 45 inches
1275 MINNESOTA STREET SF. CA
RENABRANSTENGALLERY.COM 415.982.3292
Paul KOS
>RR
Opening Reception: Saturday May 7, 6-9pm
May 7 - June 18
441 O’Farrell St.
</end old location>
Petra CORTRIGHT
>Zero-Day Darling
Opening Reception: Friday May 13, 6-9pm
May 13 - July 16
1275 Minnesota St. / Ground Floor
</new location>
[email protected] // @evergoldprojects